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Thomas Carlyle. 



42881 



l_ibw»i' V of Congress 
1 WO C0P<€S RECEIVED 

SEP 4 1900 

Copyright ontrjf 

SECOND COPY. 

DeKv«r«d to 

ORDIR DIVISION, 
SEP 5 1900 



TK 



Copyright, 1900, by W. B. Conkey Company. 



74142 



ON 

HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, 

AND 

The Heroic in History. 



i 



LECTURE I. 

THE HERO AS A DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM: 
SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY. 

[Tuesday, 5th May, 1840.] 

We have undertaken to discourse here for a 
little on Great Men, their manner of appear- 
ance in our world's business, how they "have 
shaped themselves in the world's history, what 
ideas men formed of them, what work they 
did; — on Heroes, namely, and on their recep- 
tion and performance; what I call Hero-wor- 
ship and the Heroic in human affairs. Too 
evidently this is a large topic; deserving 
quite other treatment than we can expect 
to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, 
an illimitable one ; wide as Universal History 
itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, 
the history of what man has accomplished in 
this world, is at bottom the History of the 
3 



4 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Great Men who have worked here. They 
were the leaders of men, these great ones ; the 
modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense crea- 
tors, of whatsoever the general mass of men 
contrived to do or to attain ; all things that we 
see standing accomplished in the world are 
properly the outer material result, the practical 
realization and embodiment of Thoughts that 
dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: 
the soul of the whole world's history, it may 
justly be considered, were the history of these. 
Too clearly it is a topic we shall do no justice 
to in this place! 

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in 
any way, are profitable company. We cannot 
look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, 
without gaining something by him. He is the 
living light-fountain, which it is good and 
pleasant to be near. The light which enlight- 
ens, which has enlightened the darkness of the 
world ; and this not as a kindled lamp only, 
but rather as a natural luminary shining by 
the gift of Heaven ; a flowing light-fountain as 
I say, of native original insight, of manhood and 
heroic nobleness; — in whose radiance all souls 
feel that it is well with them. On any terms 
whatsoever, you will not grudge to wander in 
such neighborhood for a while. These Six 
classes of Heroes, chosen out of widely-distant 
countries and epochs, and in mere external 
figure differing altogether, ought, if we look 
faithfully at them, to illustrate several things 
for us. Could we see them well, we should 
get some glimpses into the very marrow of the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 5 

world's history. How happy, could I but, in 
any measure, in such times as these, make 
manifest to you the meanings of Heroism ; the 
divine relation (for I may we'll call it such) 
which in all times unites a Great Man to other 
men; and thus, as it were, not exhaust my sub- 
ject, but so much as break ground on it! At 
all events, I must make the attempt. 

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's 
religion is the chief fact in regard to him. A 
man's, or a nation of men's. By religion I do not 
mean here the church-creed which he professes, 
the articles of faith which he will sign and, in 
words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in 
many cases not this at all. We see men of all 
kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all 
degrees of worth or worthlessness under each 
or any of them. This is not what I call reli- 
gion, this profession and assertion ; which is 
often only a profession and assertion from the 
outworks of the man, from the mere argumen- 
tative regions of him, if even so deep as that. 
But the thing a man does practically believe 
(and this is often enough without asserting it 
even to himself, much less to others) ; the 
thing a man does practically lay to heart, and 
know for certain, concerning his vital relations 
to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and 
destiny there, that is in all cases the primary 
thing for him, and creatively determines all the 
rest. That is his religion ; or, it may be, his 
mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner 
it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually 



6 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

related to the Unseen World or No- World ; and 
I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to 
a very great extent what the man is, what the 
kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a 
nation we inquire, therefore, first of all What 
religion they had? Was it Heathenism,-— plur- 
ality of gods, mere sensuous representation of 
this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized 
element therein Physical Force? Was it Chris- 
tianism ; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, 
but as the only reality; Time, through every 
meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; 
Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler 
supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepti- 
cism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there 
was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life ex- 
cept a mad one ; — doubt as to all this, or per- 
haps unbelief and flat denial? Answering of 
this question is giving us the soul of the history 
of the man or nation. The thoughts they had 
were the parents of the actions they did ; their 
feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was 
the unseen and spiritual in them that deter- 
mined the outward and actual ; — their religion, 
as I say, was the great fact about them. In 
these Discourses, limited as we are, it will be 
good to direct our survey chiefly to that reli- 
gious phasis of the matter. That once known 
well, all is known. We have chosen as the first 
Hero in our series, Odin the central figure in 
Scandinavian Paganism ; an emblem to us of a 
most extensive province of things. Let us 
look for a little at the Hero as Divinity, the 
oldest primary form of Heroism. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 7 

Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing 
this Paganism ; almost inconceivable to us in 
these days. A bewildering, inextricable jungle 
of delusions, confusions, falsehoods and ab- 
surdities, covering the whole field of Life ! A 
thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, 
if it were possible, with incredulity, — for truly 
it is not easy to understand that sane men 
could ever calmly, with their eyes open, believe 
and live by such a set of doctrines. That men 
should have worshiped their poor fellow-man 
as a God, and not him only, but stocks and 
stones, and all manner of animate and inani- 
mate objects; and fashioned for themselves 
such a distorted chaos of hallucinations by way 
of Theory of the Universe ; all this looks like 
an incredible fable. Nevertheless it is a clear 
fact that they did it. Such hideous inextric- 
able jungle of misworships, misbeliefs, men, 
made as we are, did actually hold by, and live 
at home in. This is strange. Yes, we may 
pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of 
darkness that are in man; if we rejoice in the 
heights of purer vision he has attained to. 
Such things were and are in man; in all men; 
in us too. 

Some speculators have a short way of 
accounting for the Pagan religion: mere 
quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no 
sane man ever did believe it, — merely con- 
trived to persuade other men, not worthy of 
the name of sane, to believe it! It will be 
often our duty to protest against this sort of 
hypothesis about man's doings and history; and 



8 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

I here, on the very threshold, protest against 
it in reference to Paganism, and to all other 
isms by which man has ever for a length of 
time striven to walk in this world. They have 
all had a truth in them, or men would not 
have taken them up. Quackery and dupery 
do abound; in religions, above all in the more 
advanced decaying stages of religions, they 
have fearfully abounded: but quackery was 
never the originating influence in such things; 
it was not the health and life of such things, 
but their disease, the sure precursor of their 
being about to die! Let us never forget this. 
It seems to me a most mournful hypothesis, 
that of quackery giving birth to any faith even 
in savage men. Quackery gives birth to noth- 
ing; gives death to all things. We shall not 
see into the true heart of anything, if we look 
merely at the quackeries of it; if we do not 
reject the quackeries altogether; as mere 
diseases, corruptions, with which our and all 
men's sole duty is to have done with them, to 
sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our 
practice. Man everywhere is the born enemy 
of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a 
kind of truth in it. Read the candid, clear- 
sighted, rather sceptical Mr. Turner's Account 
of his Embassy to that country, and see. 
They have their belief, these poor Thibet 
people that Providence sends down always an 
Incarnation of Himself into every generation. 
At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope ! At 
bottom still better, belief that there is a Great- 
est Man ; that he is discoverable ; that, once dis- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 9 

covered, we ought to treat him with an obedi- 
ence which knows no bounds ! . This is the 
truth of Grand Lamaism; the 'discoverability' 
is the only error here. The Thibet priests 
have methods of their own of discovering what 
Man is Greatest, fit to be supreme over them. 
Bad methods : but are they so much worse than 
our methods, — of understanding him to be 
always the eldest-born of a certain genealogy? 
Alas, it is a difficult thing to find good 

methods for! We shall begin to have a 

chance of understanding Paganism, when we 
first admit that to its followers it was, at one 
time, earnestly true. Let us consider it very 
certain that men did believe in Paganism; 
men with open eyes, sound senses, men made 
altogether like ourselves; that we, had we 
been there, should have believed in it. Ask 
now, What Paganism could have been? 

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, 
attributes such things to Allegory. It is a 
play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a 
shadowing-forth, in allegorical fable, in per- 
sonification and visual form, of what such 
poetic minds had known and felt of this Uni- 
verse. Which agrees, add they, with a primary 
law of human nature, still everywhere observ- 
ably at work, though in less important things, 
That what a man feels intensely, he struggles 
to speak-out of him, to see represented before 
him in visual shape, and as if with a kind of 
life and historical reality in it. Now doubtless 
there is such a law, and it is one of the deepest 
in human nature; neither need we doubt that 






2 Heroes 



10 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

it did operate fundamentally in this business. 
The hypothesis which ascribes Paganism 
wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a little 
more respectable ; but I cannot yet call it the 
true hypothesis. Think, would we believe, 
and take with us as our life-guidance, an alle- 
gory, a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is 
what we should require. It is a most earnest 
thing to be alive in this world; to die is not 
sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport 
to him ; it was a stern reality, altogether a 
serious matter to be alive ! 

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory 
theorists are on the way toward truth in this 
matter, they have not reached it either. 
Pagan Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Sym- 
bol of what men felt and knew about the Uni- 
verse; and all Religions are symbols of that, 
altering always as that alters : but it seems to 
me a radical perversion, and even inversion of 
the business, to put that forward as the origin 
and moving cause, when it was rather the re- 
sult and termination. To get beautiful alle- 
gories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not the 
want of man; but to know what they were to 
believe about this Universe, what course they 
were to steer in it ; what, in this mysterious 
Life of theirs, they had to hope and to fear, to 
do and to forbear doing. The Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and 
serious one: but consider whether Bunyan's 
Allegory could have preceded the Faith it sym- 
bolizes! The Faith had to be already there, 
standing believed by everybody; — of which the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 11 

Allegory could then become a shadow ; and, 
with all its seriousness, we may- say a sportful 
shadow, a mere play of the Fancy, in compar- 
ison with that awful Fact and scientific cer- 
tainty which it poetically strives to emblem. 
''The Allegory is the product of the certainty, 
not the producer of it; not in Bunyan's nor in 
any other case. For Paganism, therefore, we 
have still to inquire, Whence came that scien- 
tific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered 
heap of allegories, errors and confusions? 
How was it, what was it? 

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend 
'explaining,' in this place, or in any place, 
such a phenomenon as that far-distant distracted 
cloudy imbroglio of Paganism, — more like a 
cloudfield than a distant continent of firm land 
and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was 
one. We ought to understand that this seem- 
ing cloudfield was once a reality; that no poetic 
allegory, least of all that dupery and decep- 
tion was the origin of it. Men, I say, never 
did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's 
life on allegories: men in all times, especially 
in earnest times, have had an instinct for 
detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us 
try if, leaving out both the quack theory and 
the allegory one, and listening with affectionate 
attention to that far-off confused rumor of the 
Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as 
this at least, That there was a kind of fact at 
the heart of them; that they too were not 
mendacious and distracted, but in their own 
poor way true and sane ! 



12 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a 
man who had grown to maturity in some dark 
distance, and was brought on a sudden into 
the upper air to see the sun rise. What would 
his wonder be, his rapt astonishment at the 
sight we daily witness with indifference ! With 
the free open sense of a child, yet with the ripe 
faculty of a man, his whole heart would be 
kindled by that sight, he would discern it well 
to be Godlike, his soul would fall down in wor- 
ship before it. Now, just such a childlike 
greatness was in the primitive nations. The 
first Pagan Thinker among rude men, the first 
man that began to think, was precisely this 
child-man of Plato's. Simple, open as a child, 
yet with the depth and strength of a man. 
Nature had as yet no name for him ; he had 
not yet united under a name the infinite 
variety of sights, sounds, shapes and motions, 
which we now collectively name Universe, 
Nature, or the like, — and so with a name dis- 
miss it from us. To the wild deep-hearted 
man all was yet new, not veiled under names 
or formulas; it stood naked, fiashing-in on him 
there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature 
was to this man, what to the Thinker and 
Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This 
green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the 
mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas; — that 
great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; 
the winds sweeping through it ; the black cloud 
fashioning itself together, now pouring out 
fire, now hail and rein: what is it? Ay, what? 
At bottom we do not yet know; we can never 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 13 

"know at all. It is not by our superior insight 
that we escape the difficulty; it is by our supe- 
ior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. 
It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at 
it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every 
notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, 
hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of the 
hlack thunder-cloud 'electricity,' and lecture 
learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out 
of glass and silk: but what is it? What made 
it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? 
Science has done much for us; but it is a poor 
science that would hide from us the great 
deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither 
we can never penetrate, on which all science 
swims as a mere superficial film. This world, 
after all our science and sciences, is still a 
miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and 
more, to whosoever will think of it. 

That great mystery of Time, were there no 
other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting 
thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, 
silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on 
which we and all the Universe swim like ex- 
halations, like apparitions which are, and then 
are not: this is forever very literally a mira- 
cle; a thing to strike us dumb, — for we have 
no word to speak about it. This Universe, ah 
me — what could the wild man know of it ; what 
can we yet know? That it is a Force, and 
thousandfold Complexity of Forces; a Force 
which is not we. That is all ; it is not we, it is 
altogether different from us. Force, Force, 
everywhere Force ; we ourselves a mysterious 



14 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Force in the center of that. 'There is not a 
leaf rotting- on the highway but has Force in 
it: how else could it rot?' Nay surely, to the 
Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were possible, 
it must be a miracle too, this huge illimitable 
whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here ; 
never-resting whirlwind, high as Immensity, 
old as Eternity. What is it? God's creation, 
the religious people answer; it is the Almighty 
God's! Atheistic science babbles poorly of it, 
with scientific nomenclatures, experiments^ 
and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing, 
to be bottled up in Leyden jars and sold over 
counters ; but the natural sense of man, in all 
times, if he will honestly apply his sense, pro- 
claims it to be a living thing, — ah, an unspeak- 
able, godlike thing; toward which the best 
attitude for us, after never so much science, 
is awe, devout prostration and humility of 
soul ; worship if not in words, then in science. 
But now I remark farther: What in such a 
time as ours it requires a Prophet or Poet to 
teach us, namely, the stripping-off those poor 
undevout wrappages, nomenclatures and 
scientific hearsays, — this, the ancient earnest 
soul, as yet unencumbered with these things, 
did for itself. The world, which is now divine 
only to the gifted, was then divine to whom- 
soever would turn his eye upon it. He stood 
bare before it face to face. 'All was Godlike 
or God:' — Jean Paul still finds it so; the giant 
Jean Paul, who has power to escape out of 
hearsays: but there then were no hearsays. 
Canopus shining-down over the desert, with 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 15 

its blue diamond brightness (that wild blue 
-spirit-like brightness, far brighter than we 
ever witness here), would pierce into the heart 
of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was 
guiding through the solitary waste there. 
To his wild heart, with all feelings in it, with 
no speech for any feeling, it might seem a 
little eye, that Canopus, glancing-out on him 
from the great deep Eternity; revealing the 
inner Splendor to him. Cannot we understand 
liow these men worshiped Canopus; became 
what we call Sabeans, worshiping the stars? 
Such is to me the secret of all forms of Pagan- 
ism. Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder 
for which there is now no limit or measure; 
that is worship. To these primeval men, all 
' things and everything they saw exist beside 
them were an emblem of the Godlike, of some 
God. 

And look what perennial fiber of truth was 

in that. To us also, through every star, 

through every blade of grass, is not a God 

i made visible, if we will open our minds and 

eyes? We do not worship in that way now: 

i but is it not reckoned still a merit, proof of 

1 what we call a 'poetic nature,' that we recog- 

mize how every object has a divine beauty in 

iit; how every object still verily is 'a window 

(through which we may look into Infinitude 

i itself?' He that can discern the loveliness of 

{things, we call him Poet, Painter, Man of 

'Genius, gifted, lovable. These poor Sabeans 

did even what he does, — in their own fashion. 

That they did it, in what fashion soever, was 



16 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

a merit: better than what the entirely stupid 
man did, what the horse and camel did, — 
namely, nothing! 

But now if all things whatsoever that we 
look upon are emblems to us of the Highest 
God, I add that more so than any of them is man 
such an emblem. You have heard of St. 
Chrysostom's celebrated saying in reference to 
the Shekinah, or Ark of Testimony, visible 
Revelation of God, among the Hebrews: 
"The true Shekinah is Man!" Yes, it is even 
so: this it no vain phrase; it is veritably so. 
The essence of our being, the mystery in us 
that calls itself "I," — ah, what words have we 
for such things? — is a breath of Heaven; the 
Highest Being reveals himself in man. This 
body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not 
all as a vesture for that Unnamed? 'There is 
but one Temple in the Universe,' says the 
devout Novalis, 'and that is the Body of Man. 
Nothing is holier than that high form. Bend- 
ing before men is a reverence done to this 
Revelation in the Flash. We touch Heaven 
when we lay our hand on a human body!' This 
sounds much like a mere flourish of rhetoric ; 
but it is not so. If well meditated, it will 
turn out to be a scientific fact ; the expression, 
in such words as can be had, of the actual 
truth of the thing. We are the miracle of 
miracles, — the great inscrutable mystery of 
God. We cannot understand it, we know not 
how to speak of it; but we may feel and know, 
if we like, that it is verily so. 

Well, these truths were once more readily 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 17 

felt than now. The young generations of the 
world, who had in them the freshness of 
young children, and yet the depth of earnest 
men, who did not think that they had finished 
off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely 
giving them scientific names, but had to gaze 
direct at them there, with awe and wonder: 
they felt better what of divinity is in man 
and Nature; — they, without being mad, could 
worship Nature, and man more than anything 
else in Nature. Worship, that is, as I said 
above, admire without limit: this, in the full 
use of their faculties, with all sincerity of 
heart, they could do. I consider Hero-wor- 
ship to be the grand modifying element in that 
ancient system of thought. What I called the 
perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may 
say, out of many roots: every admiration, 
adoration of a star or natural object, was a root 
or fiber of a root; but Hero-worship is the 
deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which 
in a great degree all the rest were nourished 
and grown. 

And now if worship even of a star had some 
meaning in it, how much more might that of 
a Hero! Worship of a Hero is transcendant 

; admiration of a Great Man. I say great men 
are still admirable ; I say there is, at bottom, 

i nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling 
than this of admiration for one higher than 

1 himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to 
this hour, and to all hours, the vivif)dng influ- 
ence in man's life. Religion I find stand upon 
it; not Paganism only, but far higher and 



18 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

truer religions, — all religion hitherto known. 
Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, 
submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest 
godlike Form of Man, — is not that the germ 
of Christianity itself? The greatest of all 
Heroes is One — whom we do not name here ! 
Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; 
you will find it the ultimate perfection of a 
principle extant throughout man's whole his- 
tory on earth. 

Or coming into lower, less unspeakable 
provinces, is not all Loyalty akin to religious 
Faith also? Faith is loyalty to some inspired 
Teacher, some spiritual Hero. And what there- 
fore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all 
society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, 
submissive admiration for the truly great? 
Society is founded on Hero-worship. All dig- 
nities of rank, on which human association 
rests, are what we may call a Heroarchy (Gov- 
ernment of Heroes), — or a Hierarchy, for it is 
4 sacred enough withal! The Duke mean Dux, 
leader; King is Kon-ning, Ka?i-ning, Man that 
knows or cans. Society everywhere is some 
representation, not insupportably inaccurate, 
of a graduated Worship of Heroes; — rever- 
ence and obedience done to men really great and 
wise. Not insupportably inaccurate I say! 
They are all as bank-notes, these social digni- 
taries, all representing gold; — and several of 
them, alas, always are forged notes. We can 
do with some forged false notes; with a good 
many even; but not with all, or the most of 
them forged! No: there have to come revo- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 19 

lutions then ; cries of Democracy, Liberty and 
Equality, and I know not what: — the notes 
being all false, and no gold to be had for them, 
people take to crying in their despair that 
there is no gold, that there never was any! — 
'Gold,' Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as it was 
always and everywhere, and cannot cease till 
man himself ceases. 

I am well aware that in these days Hero- 
worship, the thing I call Hero-worship, pro- 
fesses to have gone out, and finally ceased. 
This, for reasons which it will be worth while 
some time to inquire into, is an age that as it 
were denies the existence of great men ; denies 
the desirableness of great men. Show our 
critics a great man, a Luther for example, they 
begin to what they call 'account' for him; not 
to worship him, but take the dimensions of 
him, — and bring him out to be a little kind of 
man! He was the 'creature of the Time,' 
they say; the Time called him forth, the Time 
did everything, he nothing— but what we the 
little critic could have done too! This seems 
to me but melancholy work. The Time call 
forth? Alas, we have known Times call loudly 
enough for their great man ; but not find him 
when they called! He was not there; Prov- 
idence had not sent him; the Time, calling its 
loudest, had to go down to confusion and 
wreck because he would not come when called. 

For if we will think of it, no Time need have 
gone to ruin, could it have found a man great 
enough, a man wise and good enough: wis- 
dom to discern truly what the Time wanted, 



20 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

valor to lead it on the right road thither; 
these are the salvation of any Time. But I 
liken common languid Times, with their un- 
belief, distress, perplexity, with their languid 
doubting characters and embarrassed circum- 
stances, impotently crumbling-down into ever 
worse distress toward final ruin; — all this I 
liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the light- 
ning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The 
great man, with his free force direct out of 
God's own hand, is the lightning. His word 
is the wise healing word which all can believe 
in. All blazes round him now, when he has 
once struck on it, into fire like his own. The 
dry mouldering sticks are thought to have 
called him forth. They did want him greatly ; 
but as to calling him forth ! Those are crit- 
ics of small vision, I think, who cry: "See, is 
it not the sticks that made the fire?" No sad- 
der proof can be given by a man of his own lit- 
tleness than disbelief in great men. There is 
no sadder symptom of a generation than such 
general blindness to the spiritual lightning, 
with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. 
It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all 
epochs of the world's history, we shall find the 
Great Man to have been the indispensable 
savior of his epoch; — the lightning, without 
which the fuel never would have burnt. The 
History of the World, I said already, was the 
Biography of Great Men. 

Such small critics do what they can to pro- 
mote unbelief and universal spiritual paralysis : 
but happily they cannot always completely 



! 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 21 

succeed. In all times it is possible for a man 
to arise great enough to feel that they and 
their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. 
And what is notable, in no time whatever can 
they entirely eradicate out. of living men's 
hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence 
for Great Men; genuine admiration, loyalty, 
adoration, however dim and perverted it may 
be. Hero-worship endures forever while man 
endures. Boswell venerates his Johnson, right 
truly even in the Eighteenth century. The 
unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire ; 
and burst out round him into very curious 
Hero-worship, in that last act of his life when 
they 'stifle him under roses.' It has always 
seemed to me extremely curious this of Vol- 
taire. Truly, if Christianity be the highest 
instance of Hero-worship, then we may find 
here in Voltaireism one of the lowest! He 
whose life was that of a kind of Antichrist, 
does again on this side exhibit a curious con- 
trast. No people ever were so little prone to 
admire at all as those French of Voltaire. 
Persiflage was the character of their whole 
mind: adoration had nowhere a place in it. 
Yet see ! The old man of Ferney comes up to 
Paris; an old, tottering, infirm man of eighty- 
four years. They feel that he, too, is a kind of 
Hero; that he has spent his life in opposing 
srror and injustice, delivering Calases, un- 
masking hypocrites in high places; — in short, 
hat he, too, though in a strange way, has 
•ought like a valiant man. They feel withal 
hat, if persiflage be the great thing, there 



22 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

never was such a persifleur. He is the realized 
ideal of every one of them ; the thing they are 
all wanting to be ; of all Frenchmen the most| 
French. He is properly their god, — such god 
as they are fit for. Accordingly, all persons, 1 
from the Queen Antoinette to the Douanier at 
the Porte St. Denis, do they not worship him? 
People of quality disguise themselves as tavern] 
waiters. The Maitre de Poste, with a broadj 
oath, orders his Postilion, "Vabon train; thou 
art driving M. de Voltaire." At Paris his car- 
riage is 'the nucleus of a comet, whose train 
fills whole streets. ' The ladies pluck a hair) 
or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred relic. 
There was nothing highest, beautifulest, nobl- 
est in all France, that did not feel this man to; 
be higher, beautifuler, nobler. 

Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel 
Johnson, from the divine Founder of Chris- 
tianity to the withered Pontiff of Enclyclopae- 
dism, in all times and places, the Hero has 
been worshiped. It will ever be so. We alii 
love great men : love, venerate and bow down 
submissive before great men: nay, can we 
honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does 
not every true man feel that he is himself made 
higher by doing reverence to what is really 
above him? No nobler or more blessed feel- 
ing dwells in man's heart. And to me it is 
very cheering to consider that no skeptical 
logic, or general triviality, insincerity and 
aridity of any Time and its influences can de- 
stroy this noble inborn loyalty and worship 
that is in man. In times of unbelief, which 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 23 

; soon have to become times of revolution, much 
■< down-rushing-, sorrowful decay and ruin is vis- 
: ible to everybody. For myself in these days, 
f I seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero- 
worship the everlasting adamant lower than " 
Ji which the confused wreck of revolutionary 
< things cannot fall. The confused wreck of 
; things crumbling, and even crashing and tum- 
f bling all round us in these revolutionary ages, 
1 will get down so far ; no farther. It is an eter- 
■ nal corner-stone, from which they can begin to 
1 build themselves up again. That man, in some 
sense or other, worships Heroes ; that we all of 
usreverenceandmust ever reverence Great Men : 
this is, to me, the living rock amid all rush- 
ings-down whatsoever; — the one fixed point in 
modern revolutionary history, otherwise as if 
bottomless and shoreless. 

So much of truth, only under an ancient 
obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, 
do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Na- 
ture is still divine, the revelation of the work- 
ings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: 
this under poor cramped incipient forms, is 
what all Pagan religions have struggled, as 
I they could, to set forth. I think Scandinavian 
r Paganism to, us here, is more interesting than 
lany other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it 
continued in these regions of Europe till the 
jeleventh century : eight hundred years ago the 
'Norwegians were still worshipers of Odin. 
It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers ; 
the men whose blood still runs in our veins, 
whom doubtless we still resemble in so many 



24 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ways. Strange: they did believe that, while 
we believe so differently. Let us look a little 
at this poor Norse creed, for many reasons. 
We have tolerable means to do it; for there is! 
another point of interest in these Scandinavian 
mythologies: that they have been preserved so 
well. 

In that strange island Iceland — burst-up, the 
geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the 
sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swal- 
lowed many months of every }^ear in black tem- 
pests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in sum- 
mer-time; towering up there, stern and grim, 
in the North Ocean ; with its snow jokuls, roar- 
ing geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic 
chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of 
Frost and Fire; — where of all places we least 
looked for Literature or written memorials, 
the record of these things was written down. 
On the seaboard of this wild land is a rim of 
grassy country where cattle can subsist, and 
men by means of them and of what the sea 
yields; and it seems they were poetic men 
these, men who had deep thoughts in them, 
and uttered musically their thoughts. Much 
would be lost, had Iceland not been burst-up 
from the sea, not been discovered by the 
Northmen ! The old Norse Poets were many 
of them natives of Iceland. 

Ssemund, one of the early Christian Priests 
there, who perhaps had a lingering fondness 
for Paganism, collected certain of their old 
Pagan songs, just about becoming obsolete 
then, — Poems or Chants of a mythic, pro- 



J 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 25 

- phetic, mostly all of a religious character ; that 

■ is what Norse critics call the Elder or Poetic 
< Edda. Edda, a word of uncertain etymology, 

1 is thought to signify Ancestress. Snorro Sturle- 
( son, an Iceland gentleman, an extremely 
notable personage, educated by this Saemund's 
' grandson, took in hand next, near a century 
' afterward, to put together, among several 

• other books he wrote, a kind of Prose Synopsis 

• of the whole Mythology; elucidated by new 

■ fragments of traditionary verse. A work con- 
i structed really with great ingenuity, native tal- 

■ ent, what one might call unconscious art ; alto- 
' gether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant read- 

■ ing still: this is the Younger or Prose Edda. 

! By these and the numerous other Sagas, mostly 

Icelandic, with the commentaries, Icelandic or 

not, which go on zealously in the North to this 

day, it is possible to gain some direct insight 

even yet; and see that old Norse system of 

i Belief, as it were, face to face. Let us forget 

t that it is erroneous Religion ; let us look at it 

as old Thought, and try if we cannot sympa- 

i thize with it somewhat. 

1 The primary characteristic of this old North- 
Hand Mythology I find to be Impersonation of 
I the visible workings of Nature. Earnest sim- 
Iple recognition of the workings of Physical 
<] Nature, as a thing wholly miraculous, stupen- 
dous and divine. What we now lecture of as 
Science, they wondered at. and fell down in 
awe before, as Religion. The dark hostile 
Powers of Nature they figure to themselves as 
''Jotuns,'* Giants, huge shaggy beings of a de- 



26 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

monic character. Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest; 
these are Jotuns. The friendly Powers again, 
as Summer-heat, the Sun, are Gods. The em- 
pire of this Universe is divided between these 
two ; they dwell apart, in perennial internecine 
feud. The Gods dwell above in Asgard, the 
Garden of the Asen, or Divinities; Jotunheim, 
a distant dark chaotic land, is the home of the 
Jotuns. 

Curious all this ; and not idle or inane, if we 
will look at the foundation of it! The power 
of Fire, or Flame, for instance, which we des- 
ignate by some trivial chemical name, thereby 
hiding from ourselves the essential character 
of wonder that dwells in it as in all things, is 
with these "old Northmen, Loke, a most swift 
subtle Demon, of the brood of the Jotuns. 
The savages of the Ladrones Islands, too (say 
some Spanish voyagers) thought Fire, which 
they never had seen before, was a devil or god, 
that bit you sharply when you touched it, and 
that lived upon dry wood. From us too no 
Chemistry, if it had not Stupidity to help it, 
would hide that Flame is a wonder. What is 
Flame? — Frost the old Norse Seer discerns to 
be a monstrous hoary Jotun, the Giant Thrym, 
Hrym ; or Rime, the old word now nearly obso- 
lete here, but still used in Scotland to signify 
hoar-frost. Rime was not then as now a dead 
chemical thing, but a living Jotun or Devil; the 
monstrous Jotun Rime drove home his Horses 
at night, sat 'combing their manes,' — which 
Horses were Hail-Clouds, or fleet Frost- Winds. 
His Cows — No, not his, but a kinsman's, the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 27 

Giant Hymir's Cows, are Icebergs: this Hymir 
"looks at the rocks" with his devil-eye, and 
they split in the glance of it. 

Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vit- 
reous or resinous; it was the God Donner 
(Thunder) or Thor, — God also of beneficent 
Summer-heat. The thunder was his wrath; 
the gathering 'of the black clouds is the draw- 
ing-down of Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt 
bursting out of Heaven is the all-rending 
Hammer flung from the hand of Thor: he 
urges his loud chariot over the mountain-tops, 
— that is the peal; wrathful he 'blows in his 
red beard' — that is the rustling stormblast 
before the thunder begin. Balder again, the 
White God, the beautiful, the just and benig- 
nant (whom the early Christian Missionaries 
found to resemble Christ), is the Sun, — beau- 
tifulest of visible things; wondrous, too, and 
divine still, after all our Astronomies and 
Almanacs! But perhaps the notablest god we 
hear tell of is one of whom Grimm the German 
Etymologist finds trace; the God Wit?isch, or 
Wish. The God Wish ; who could give us all 
that we wished! Is not this the sincerest and 
yet rudest voice of the spirit of man? The 
rudest ideal that man ever formed ; which still 
shows itself in the latest forms of our spiritual 
culture. Higher considerations have to teach 
us that the God Wish is not the true God. 

Of the other Gods or Jotuns I will mention 
only for etymology's sake that Sea-tempest is 
the Jotun Aegir, a very dangerous Jotun; — 
and now to this day, on our river Trent, as I 



28 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

learn, the Nottingham bargemen, when the 
river is in a certain flooded state (a kind of 
backwater, or eddying swirl it has, very dan- 
gerous to them), call it Eager; they cry out, 
"Have a care, there is the Eager coming!" 
Curious; that word surviving, like the peak of 
a submerged world! The oldest Nottingham 
bargeman had believed in the God Aegir. In- 
deed, our English blood too in good part is 
Danish, Norse; or rather, at bottom, Danish 
and Norse and Saxon have no distinction, ex- 
cept a superficial one, — as of Heathen and 
Christian, or the like. But all over our island 
we are mingled largely with Danes proper, — 
from the incessant invasions there were : and 
this, of course, in a greater proportion along 
the east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, in 
the North Country. From the Humber up- 
land, all over Scotland, the Speech of .the 
common people is still in a singular decree Ice- 
landic; its Germanism has still a peculiar 
Norse tinge. They too are 'Normans,' North- 
men, — if that be any great beauty! — 

Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by 
and by. Mark at present so much ; what the 
essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all 
Paganism is: a recognition of the forces of 
Nature as godlike, stupendous, personal 
Agencies, — as Gods and Demons. Not incon- 
ceivable to us. It is the infant Thought of 
man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on 
this ever-stupendous Universe. To me there 
is in the Norse System something very genu- 
ine, very great and manlike. A broad simplic- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 29 

ity, rusticity, so very different from the light 
gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism, dis- 
tinguishes this Scandinavian System. It is 
Thought; the genuine thought of deep, rude, 
earnest minds, fairly opened to the things 
about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart 
inspection of the things, — the first character- 
istic of all good Thought in all times. Not 
graceful lightness, half sport, as in the Greek 
Paganism ; a certain homely truthfulness and 
rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, dis- 
closes itself here. It is strange, after our 
beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling 
mythuses, to come down upon the Norse 
Gods 'brewing ale* to hold their feast with 
Aegir, the Sea-Jotun ; sending out Thor to get 
the caldron for them in the Jotun country; 
Thor, after many adventures, clapping the Pot 
on his head, like a huge hat, and walking off 
with it, — quite lost in it, the ears of the Pot 
reaching down to his heels! A kind of vacant 
hugeness, large awkward gianthood, charac- 
terizes that Norse System ; enormous force, as 
yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless 
with large uncertain strides. Consider only 
their primary mythus of the Creation. The 
Gods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a 
Giant made by 'warm wind,' and much con- 
fused work, out of the conflict of Frost and 
Fire, — determined on constructing a world with 
him. His blood made the Sea; his flesh was 
the Land, the Rocks his bones; of his eye- 
brows they formed Asgard their God's-dwell- 
ing; his skull was the great blue vault of Im- 



30 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

mensity, and the brains of it became the |j 
Clouds. What a Hyper-Brobdignagian bus- fe 
iness! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike, p 
enormous; — to be tamed in due time into the 
compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike 
and stronger than gianthood, of the Shaks- 
peares, the Goethes! — Spiritually as well as 
bodily these men are our progenitors. 

I like, too, that representation they have of 
the Tree Igdrasil. All Life is figured by them 
as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Exist- 
ence, has its roots deep-down in the kingdom 
of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up 
heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the 
whole Universe: it is the Tree of Existence. 
At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom, sit 
Three Nomas, Fates, — the Past, Present, 
Future; watering its roots from the Sacred 
Well. Its 'boughs,' with their buddings and 
disleafings, — events, things suffered, things 
done, catastrophes, — stretch through all lands 
and times. Is not every leaf of it a biography, 
every fiber there an act or word? Its boughs 
are Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is 
the noise of Human Existence, onward from 
of old. - It grows there, the breath of Human 
Passion rustling through it ; — or stormtost, the 
stormwind howling through it like the voice of 
all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of Exist- 
ence. It is the past, the present, and the fut- 
ure : what was done, what is doing, what will 
be done; 'the infinite conjugation of the verb 
To do. ' Considering how human things cir- 
culate, each inextricably in communion with 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 31 

d|l, — how the word I speak to you to-day is 
oorrowed, not from Ulfila the Mcesogoth only, 
but from all men since the first man began to 
speak, — I find no similitude so true as this 

'of a Tree. Beautiful ; altogether beautiful and 

•great. The 'Machine of the Universe,' — alas, 

'do but think of that in contrast! 

Well, it is strange enough, this old Norse 
1 view of Nature ; different enough from what 
we believe of Nature. Whence it specially 
came, one would not like to be compelled to 
say very minutely! One thing we may say: 
It came from the thoughts of Norse men ; — 
from the thought, above all, of the first Norse 
man who had an original power of thinking. 
The F^irst Norse 'man of genius,' as we 
should call him ! Innumerable men had 
passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb 
vague wonder, such as the very animals may 
feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring 
wonder, such as men only feel — till the great 
Thinker came, the original man, the Seer ; whose 
shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering 
capability of all into thought. It is ever the 
way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. 
What he says, all men were not far from say- 
iing, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all 
start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, 
rround his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even 
so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day 
from night; — is it not, indeed, the awakening 
for them from no-being into being, from death 
into life? We still honor such a man; call him 



32 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Poet, Genius, and so forth : but to these wild 
men he was a very magician, a worker of mir- 
aculous unexpected blessing for them; a 
Prophet, a God! — Thought once awakened 
does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a 
System of Thought; grows, in man after man, 
generation after generation, — till its full stat- 
ure is reached, and such System of Thought 
can grow no farther, but must give place to 
another. 

For the Norse people, the Man now named 
Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, was 
such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul 
and body; a Hero, of worth immeasurable; 
admiration for whom, transcending the known 
bounds, became adoration. Has he not the 
power of articulate Thinking; and many other 
powers, as yet miraculous? So, with bound- 
less gratitude, would the rude Norse heart 
feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx- 
enigma of this Universe; given assurance to 
them of their own destiny there? By him they 
know now what they have to do here, what to 
look for hereafter. Existence has become 
articulate, melodious by him; he first has 
made Life alive! — we may call this Odin, the 
origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever 
name the First Norse Thinker bore while he 
was a man among men. His view of the Uni- 
verse once promulgated, a like view starts into 
being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, 
while it continues credible there. In all minds 
it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic 
ink ; at his word it starts into visibility in all. 



J 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 33 

Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great 
event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival 
of a Thinker in the world! — 

One other thing we must not forget ; it will 
explain, a little, the confusion of these Norse 
Eddas. They are not one coherent System of 
Thought; but properly the summation of sev- 
eral successive systems. All this of the old 
Norse Belief which is flung-out for us, is one 
level of distance in the Edda, like a picture 
painted on the same canvas, does not at all 
stand so in the reality. It stands rather at all 
manner of distances and depths, of successive 
generations since the Belief first began. All 
Scandinavian thinkers, since the first of them, 
contributed to that Scandinavian System of 
Thought; in ever-new elaboration and addi- 
tion, it is the combined work of them all. 
What history it had, how it changed from 
shape to shape, by one thinker's contribution 
after another, till it got to the full final shape 
we see it under in the Edda, no man will now 
ever know : its Councils of Trebisond, Coun- 
cils of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers 
are sunk without echo in the dark night ! Only 
that it had such a history we can all know. 
Wheresoever a thinker appeared, there in the 
thing he thought-of was a contribution, acces- 
sion, a change of revolution made. Alas, the 
grandest 'revolution' of all, the one made by 
the man Odin himself, is not this too sunk for 
us like the rest! Of Odin what history? 
Strange rather to reflect that he had a history! 
That this Odin, in his wild Norse vesture, with 

/ 3 Heroes 



34 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

his wild beard and eyes, his rude Norse speech 
and ways, was a man like us; with our sor- 
rows, joys, with our limbs, features; — intrinsi- 
cally all one as we : and did such a work ! But 
the work, much of it, has perished; the 
worker, all to the name. "Wednesday," men 
will say to-morrow; Odin's day! Of Odin 
there exists no history; no document of it; no 
guess about it worth repeating. 

Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, 
almost in a brief business style, writes down, 
in his Heimskringla, how Odin was a heroic 
Prince, in the Black-Sea region, with Twelve 
Peers, and a great people straitened for room. 
How he led these Asen (Asiatics) of his out of 
Asia; settled them in the North parts of Eur- 
ope, by warlike conquest; invented Letters, 
Poetry and so forth, — and came by and by to 
be worshiped as Chief God by these Scandi- 
navians, his Twelve Peers made into Twelve 
Sons of his own, Gods like himself: Snorro has 
no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus, a very 
curious Northman of that same century, is 
still more unhesitating; scruples not to find out 
a historical fact in every individual mythus, 
and writes it down as a terrestrial event in 
Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus, learned and 
cautious, some centuries later, assigns by cal- 
culation a date for it: Odin, he says, came into 
Europe about the Year 70 before Christ. Of 
all which, as grounded on mere uncertainties, 
found to be untenable now, I need say noth- 
ing. Far, very far beyond the Year 70? Odin's 
date, adventures, whole terrestrial history, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 35 

figure and environment are sunk from us for- 
ever into unknown thousands of years. 

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so 
far as to deny that any man Odin ever existed. 
He proves it by etymology. The word 
Wuotan, which is the original form of Odin, a 
word spread, as name of their chief Divinity, 
over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this 
word, which connects itself, according to 
Grimm, with the Latin vadere, with the Eng- 
lish wade and suchlike, — means primarily 
Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and 
is the fit name of the highest god, not of any 
man. The word signifies Divinity, he says, 
among the old Saxons, Germans and all Teu- 
tonic nations; the adjectives formed from it all 
signify divine, supreme, or something pertain- 
ing to the chief god. Like enough ! We must 
bow to Grimm in matters etymological. Let 
us consider it fixed that Wuotan means Wading, 
force of Movement. And now still, what hin- 
ders it from being the name of a Heroic Man 
and Mover, as well as of a god? As for the 
adjectives, and words formed from it, — did not 
the Spaniards in their universal admiration for 
Lope, get into the habit of saying 'a Lope 
flower,' 'a Lope dama,' if the flower or woman 
were of surpassing beauty? Had this lasted, 
Lope would have grown, in Spain, to be an 
adjective signifying godlike also. Indeed, 
Adam Smith, in his Essay on Language, sur- 
mises that all adjectives whatsoever were 
formed precisely in that way: some very green 
thing, chiefly notable for its greenness, got the 



36 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

appellative name Green, and then the next 
thing remarkable for that quality, a tree for 
instance, was named the green tree, — as we 
still say 'the steam coach,' 'four-horse coach,' 
or the like. All primary adjectives, according 
to Smith, were formed in this way; were at 
first substantives and things. We cannot anni- 
hilate a man for etymologies like that ! Surely 
there was a First Teacher and Captain ; surely 
there must have been an Odin, palpable to the 
sense at one time; no adjective, but a real 
Hero of flesh and blood ! The voice of all tra- 
dition, history or echo of history, agrees with 
all that thought will teach one about it, to 
assure us of this. 

How the man Odin came to be considered a 
god, the chief god? — that surely is a question 
which nobody would wish to dogmatize upon. 
I have said, his people knew no limits to their 
admiration of him ; they had as yet no scale to 
measure admiration by. Fancy your own 
generous heart's-love of some greatest man 
expanding till it transcended all bounds, till 
it rilled and overflowed the whole field of your 
thought! Or what if this man Odin, — since a 
great deep soul, with the affiatus and mysterious 
tide of vision and impulse rushing on him he 
knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind 
of terror and wonder to himself, — should have 
felt that perhaps he was divine; that he was 
some effluence of the 'Wuotan,' 'Movement,' 
Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his 
rapt vision all Nature was the awful Flame- 
image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 37 

here in him ! He was not necessarily false ; he 
was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. 
A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what 
he is, — alternates between the highest height 
and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the 
least measure — Himself! What others take 
him for, and what he guesses that he may be ; 
these two items strangely act on one another, 
help to determine one another. With all men 
reverently admiring him ; with his own wild 
soul full of noble ardors and affections; of 
whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new 
light; a divine Universe bursting all into god- 
like beauty round him, and no man to whom 
the like ever had befallen, what could he think 
himself to be? "Wuotan?" All man an- 
swered, "Wuotan!" — 

And then consider what mere Time will do 
in such cases; how if a man was great while 
living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. 
What an enormous camera-obscura magnifier 
is Tradition! How a thing grows in the 
human Memory, in the human Imagination, 
when love, worship and all that lies in the 
human Heart, is there to encourage it. And 
in the darkness, in the entire ignorance; with- 
out date or document, no book, no Arundel- 
marble ; only here and there some dumb monu- 
mental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, 
were there no books, any great man would 
grow mythic, the contemporaries who had seen 
him, being once all dead. And in three-hun- 
dred years, and in three-thousand years — ! — To 
attempt theorizing in such matters would 



38 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

profit little : they are matters which refuse to 
be theoremed and diagramed; which Logic 
ought to know that she cannot speak of. 
Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost 
distance, some gleam as of a small real light 
shining in the center of that enormous cam- 
era-obscura image ; to discern that the center 
of it all was not a madness and nothing, but a 
sanity and something. 

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex 
of the Norse mind, dark b£t living, waiting 
only for light; this is to me the center of the 
whole. How such light will then shine out, 
and with wondrous thousandfold expansion 
spread itself, in forms and colors, depends not 
on it, so much as on the National Mind, reci- 
pient of it. The colors and forms of your light 
will be those of the cut-glass it has to shine 
through. — Curious to think how, for every 
man, any the truest fact is modeled by the 
nature of the man ! I said, The earnest man, 
speaking to his brother men, must always have 
stated what seemed to him a fact, a real 
Appearance of Nature. But the way in which 
such appearance or fact shaped itself, — what 
sort of fact it became for him, — was and is 
modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, 
subtle, but universal, ever-operating laws. 
The world of Nature, for every man, is the 
Phantasy of Himself; this world is the multi- 
plex * Image of his own Dream.' Who knows 
to what unnamable subtleties of spiritual law 
all these Pagan Fables owe their shape ! The 
number Twelve, divisiblest of all, which could 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 39 

be halved, quartered, parted into three, into 

six, the most remarkable number, — this was 

enough to determine the Signs of the Zodiac, 

the number of Odin's Sons, and innumerable 

other Twelves. Any vague rumor of number 

had a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. 

: So with regard to every other matter. And 

i quite unconsciously too, — with ho notion of 

building-up 'Allegories'! But the fresh clear 

glance of those First Ages would be prompt in 

; discerning the secret relations of things, and 

1 wholly open to obey these. Schiller finds in 

! the Cestus of Venus an everlasting aesthetic 

truth as to the nature of all Beauty; curious: — 

but he is careful not to insinuate that the old 

Greek Mythists had any notion of lecturing 

about the 'Philosophy of Criticism' ! On the 

whole, we must leave those boundless regions. 
Cannot we conceive that Odin was a reality? 
Error indeed, error enough : but sheer false- 
hood, idle fables, allegory aforethought, — we 
will not believe that our Fathers believed in 
I these. 

Odin's Runes are a significant feature of 
ihim. Runes, and the miracles of 'magic' he 
\ worked by them, make a great feature in tradi- 
tion. Runes are the Scandinavian Alphabet; 
suppose Odin to have been the inventor of 
1 Letters, as well as 'magic' among that people! 
1 It is the greatest invention man has ever made, 
\ this of marking-down the unseen thought that 
is in him by written characters. It is a kind 
of second speech, almost as miraculous as the 
first. You remember the astonishment and 



40 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

incredulity of Atahualpa the Peruvian King; 
how he made the Spanish Soldier who was 
guarding him scratch Dios on his thumb-nail, 
that he might try the next soldier with it, to 
ascertain whether such a miracle was possible. 
If Odin brought Letters among his people, he 
might work magic enough! 

Writing by Runes has some air of being or- 
iginal among the Norsemen : not a Phoenician 
Alphabet, but a native Scandinavian one. 
Snorro tell us farther that Odin invented 
Poetry ; the music of human speech, as well as 
that miraculous runic marking of it. Trans- 
ports yourselves into the early childhood of 
nations; the first beautiful morning-light of 
our Europe, when all yet lay in fresh young 
radiance as of a great sunrise, and our Europe 
was first beginning to think, to be ! Wonder, 
hope ; infinite radiance of hope and wonder, 
as of a young child's thoughts, in the hearts of 
the strong men ! Strong sons of Nature ; and 
here was not only a wild Captain and Fighter; 
discerning with his wild flashing eyes what to 
do, with his wild lion-heart daring and doing 
it ; but a Poet, too, all that we mean by a Poet, 
Prophet, great devout Thinker and Inventor, 
— as the truly Great Man ever is. A Hero is a 
Hero at all points; in the soul and thought of 
him first of all. This Odin, in his rude semi- 
articulate way, had a word to speak. A great 
heart laid open to take in this great Universe, 
and man's Life here, and utter a great word 
about it. A hero, as I say, in his own rude 
manner; a wise, gifted, noble-hearted man. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 41 

And now, if we still admire such a man beyond 
all others, what must these wild Norse souls, 
first awakened into thinking, have made of 
him! To them, as yet without names for it, 
he was noble and noblest; Hero, Prophet, God; 
Wiwtan, the greatest of all. Thought is 
Thought, however it speak or spell itself. In- 
trinsically, I conjecture, this Odin must have 
been of the same sort of stuff as the greatest 
kind of men. A great thought in the wild 
deep heart of him ! The rough words he artic- 
ulated, are they not the rudimental roots of 
those English words we still use? He worked 
so, in that obscure element. But he was as a 
light kindled in it; alight of Intellect, rude 
Nobleness of heart, the only kind of lights we 
have yet ; a Hero, as I say ; and he had to shine 
there, and make his obscure element a little 
lighter, — as is still the task of us all. 

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman ; 
the finest Teuton whom that race had yet 
produced. The rude Norse heart burst-up 
into boundless admiration round him; into 
adoration. He is as a root of so many great 
things; the fruit of him is found growing, from 
deep thousands of years, over the whole field 
of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as I 
said, is it not still Odin's day? Wednesbury, 
Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth: Odin 
grew into England, too, these are still leaves 
from that root ! He was the Chief God to all 
the Teutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norse- 
man ; — in such way did they admire their Pat- 

4 Heroes 



42 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

tern Norseman; that was the fortune he had 
in the world. 

Thus, if the man Odin himself have vanished 
utterly, there is this huge Shadow of him 
which still projects itself over the whole His- 
tory of his People. For this Odin once admit- 
ted to be God, we can understand well that the 
whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim 
No-scheme, whatever it might before have 
been, would now begin to develop itself alto- 
gether differently, and grow thenceforth in a 
new manner. What this Odin saw into, and 
taught with his runes and his rhymes, the 
whole Teutonic People laid to heart and car- 
ried forward. His way of thought became 
•their way of thought: — such, under new con- 
ditions, is the history of every great thinker 
still. In gigantic confused lineaments, like 
some enormous camera-obscura shadow thrown 
upward from the dead deeps of the Past, and 
covering the whole Northern Heaven, is not 
that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort the 
Portraiture of this man Odin? The gigantic 
image of his natural face, legible or not leg- 
ible there, expanded and confused in that man- 
ner! Ah, Thought, I say, is always Thought. 
No great man lives in vain. The History of 
the world is but the Biography of great men. 

To me there is something very touching in 
this primeval figure of Heroism; in such art- 
less, helpless, but hearty entire reception of a 
Hero by his fellow-men. Never so helpless in 
shape, it is the noblest of feelings, and a feel- 
ing in some shape or other perennial as man 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 43 

himself. If I could show in any measure, 
what I feel deeply for a long time now, That 
it is the vital element of manhood, the soul of 
man's history here in our world, — it would be 
the chief use of this discoursing at present. 
We do not now call our great men Gods, nor 
admire without limit; ah, no, with limit 
enough ! But if we have no great men, or do 
not admire at all, — that were a still worse case. 
This poor Scandinavian Hero-worship, that 
whole Norse way of looking at the Universe, 
and adjusting oneself there, has an indestruct- 
ible merit for us. A rude childlike way of rec- 
ognizing the divineness of Nature, the divine- 
ness of Man; most rude, yet heartfelt, robust, 
giantlike ; betokening what a giant of a man 
this child would yet grow to! — It was a truth, 
and is none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifled 
voicebf the long-buried generations of our own 
Fathers, calling out of the depth of ages to us, 
in whose veins their blood still runs : "This 
then, this is what we made of the world : this 
is all the image and notion we could form to 
ourselves of this great mystery of a Life and 
Universe. Despise it not. You are raised 
high above it, to large free scope of vision; 
but you, too, are not yet at the top. No, your 
notion, too, so much enlarged, is but a partial, 
imperfect one; that matter is a thing no man 
will ever, in time or out of time, comprehend; 
after thousands of years of ever-new expan- 
sion, man will find himself but struggling to 
comprehend again a part of it: the thing is 



44 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

larger than man, not to be comprehended by 
him; an Infinite thing!" 

The essence of the Scandinavian, as, indeed, 
of all Pagan Mythologies, we found to be rec- 
ognition of the divineness of Nature ; sincere 
communion of man with the mysterious invis- 
ible Powers visibly seen at work in the world 
round him. This, I should say, is more sin- 
cerely done in the Scandinavian than in any 
Mythology I know. Sincerity is the great char- 
acteristic of it. Superior sincerity (far supe- 
rior) consoles us for the total want of old Gre- 
cian grace. Sincerity, I think, is better than 
grace. I feel that these old Northmen were 
looking into Nature with open eye and soul : 
most earnest, honest ; childlike, and yet man- 
like; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth 
and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, un- 
f earing way. A right valiant, true old race. of 
men. Such recognition of Nature one finds to 
be the chief element of Paganism : recognition 
of Man, and his Moral Duty, though this, too, 
is not wanting, comes to be the chief element 
only in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, 
is a great distinction and epoch in Human 
Beliefs; a great landmark in the religious 
development of Mankind. Man first puts him- 
self in relation with Nature and her Powers, 
wonders and worships over those; not till a' 
later epoch does he discern that all Power is 
Moral, that the grand point is the distinction 
for him of Good and Evil, of Thou shalt and 
Thou shalt not. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 45 

With regard to all these fabulous delinea- 
tions in the Edda, I will remark, moreover, as 
indeed, was already hinted, that most probably 
they must have been of much newer date; 
most probably, even from the first, were com- 
paratively idle for the old Norsemen, and as it 
were a kind of Poetic sport. Allegory and 
Poetic Delineation, as I said above, cannot be 
religious Faith ; the Faith itself must first be 
there, then Allegory enough will gather round 
it, as the fit body round its soul. The Norse 
Faith, I can well suppose, like other Faiths, 
was most active while it lay mainly in the 
silent state, and had not yet much to say about 
itself, still less to sing. 

Among those shadowy Edda matters, amid 
all that fantastic congeries of assertions, and 
traditions, in their musical Mythologies, the 
main practical belief a man could have was 
probably not much more than this: of the 
Valkyrs and the Hall of Odin; of an inflexible 
Destiny; and that the one thing needful for a 
man was to be brave. The Valkyrs are Choos- 
ers of the Slain ; a Destiny inexorable, which 
it is useless trying to bend or soften, has ap- 
pointed who is to be slain; this was a funda- 
mental point for the Norse believer;— as, in- 
deed, it is for all earnest men everywhere, for 
a Mahomet, a Luther, for a Napoleon, too. It 
lies at the basis this for every such man ; it is 
the roof out of which his whole system of 
thought is woven. The Valkyrs; and then 
that these Choosers lead the brave to a heav- 
enly Hall of Odin; only the base and slavish 



46 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

being thrust elsewhither, into the realms of 
Hela the Death-goddess: I take this to have 
been the soul of the whole Norse Belief. They 
understood in their heart that it was indispen- 
sable to be brave; that Odin would have no 
favor for them, but despise and thrust them 
out, if they were not brave. Consider, too, 
whether there is not something in this! 
It is an everlasting duty, valid in our 
day as in that, the duty of being brave. 
Valor is still value. The first duty for a man 
is still that of subduing Fear. We must get 
rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A 
man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; 
his very thoughts are false, he thinks too, as 
a slave and coward, till he have got Fear under 
his feet. Odin's creed, if we disentangle the 
real kernel of it, is true to this hour. A man 
shall and must be valiant; he must march for- 
ward, and quit himself like a man, — trusting 
imperturbably in the appointment and choice of 
the upper Powers; and, on the whole, not fear 
at all. Now and always, the completeness of 
his victory over Fear will determine how much 
of a man "he is. 

It is doubtless very savage, that kind of valor 
of the old Northmen. Snorro tells us they 
thought it a shame and misery not to die in 
battle ; and if natural death seemed to be com- 
ing on, they would cut wounds in their flesh, 
that Odin might receive them as warriors slain. 
Old kings, about to die, had their body laid 
into a ship ; the ship sent forth, with sails set 
and slow fire burning it ; that, once out at sea, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 47 

■j it might blaze up in flame, and in such man- 
, ner bury worthily the old hero, at once in the 
, sky and in the ocean! Wild bloody valor; yet 
. valor of its kind ; better, I say, than none. In 
( l the old Sea-kings, too, what an indomitable 
rugged energy! Silent, with closed lips, as I 
fancy them, unconscious that they were spe- 
I cially brave ; defying the wild ocean with its 
! monsters, and all men and things; — progeni- 
tors of our own Blakes and Nelsons! No 
i Homer sang those Norse Sea-kings; but Aga- 
• memnon's was a small audacity, and of small 
fruit in the world, to some of them; — to 
['IHrolf'sof Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, or 
iRollo Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, 
I has a share in governing England at this hour. 
Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild 
sea-roving and battling, through so many gen- 
erations. It needed to be ascertained which 
was the strongest kind of men; who were to 
be ruler over whom. Among the Northland 
'Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title 
Wood-cutter; Forest-felling Kings. Much lies 
iin that. I suppose at bottom many of them 
vwere forest-fellers as well as fighters, though 
tthe Skalds talk mainly of the latter, — mislead- 
ing certain critics not a little; for no nation of 
rmen could ever live by fighting alone ; there 
could not produce enough come out of that! I 
=suppose the right good fighter was oftenest also 
the right good forest-feller, — the right good 
i improver, discerner, doer and worker in every 
kind; for true valor, different enough from 
ferocity, is the basis of all. A more legitimate 



48 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

kind of valor that ; showing itself against the 
untamed Forests and dark brute Powers of 
Nature, to conquer Nature for us. In the 
same direction have not we their descendants 
since carried it far? May such valor last for-, 
ever with us ! 

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's 
voice and heart, as with an impressiveness out 
of Heaven, told his People the infinite import- 
ance of Valor, how man thereby became a god; 
and that his people, feeling a response to it in 
their own hearts, believed this message of his, 
and thought it a message out of Heaven, and 
him a Divinity for telling it them : this seems 
to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse 
Religion, from which all manner of mythol- 
ogies, symbolic practices, speculations, allegor- 
ies, songs and sagas would naturally grow. 
Grow, — how strangely! I called it a small 
light shining and shaping in the huge vortex 
of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself 
was alive; consider that. It was the eager in- 
articulate uninstructed Mind of the whole 
Norse People, longing only to become articu- 
late, to go on articulating ever farther! The 
living doctrine grows, grows; — like a Banyan- 
tree; the first seed is the essential thing: any 
branch strikes itself down into the earth, be- 
comes a new root; and so, in endless 
complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole 
jungle, one seed the parent of it all. 
Was not the whole Norse Religion, ac- 
cordingly, in some sense, what we called 
'the enormous shadow of this man's likeness?' 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 49 

Critics trace some affinity in some Norse my- 
thuses, of the Creation ^nd such like, with 
those of the Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla, 
"licking the rime from the rocks," had a kind 
of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, transported 
into frosty countries. Probably enough; in- 
deed, we may say undoubtedly, these things 
will have a kindred with remotest lands, with 
the earliest times. Thought does not die, but 
only is changed. The first man that began to 
think in this planet of ours, he was the begin- 
ner of all. And then the second man, and the 
third man; — nay, every true Thinker to this 
hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men his way of 
thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness 
over sections of the History of the World. 

Of the distinctive poetic character or merit 
of this Norse Mythology I have not room to 
speak; nor does it concern us much. Some 
wild Prophecies we have, as the Voluspa in the 
Elder Edda; of a rapt, earnest, sibylline sort. 
But they were comparatively an idle adjunct 
of the matter, men who as it were but toyed 
with the matter, these later Skalds; and it is 
their songs chiefly that survive. In later 
centuries, I suppose, they would go on sing- 
ing, poetically symbolizing, as our modern 
Painters paint, when it was no longer from 
the innermost heart, or not from the heart at 
all. This is everywhere to be well kept in 
mind. 

Gray's fragments of Norse Lore, at any rate, 
will give one no notion of it ; — any more than 
Pope will of Homer. It is no square-built 

4 



50 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

gloomy palace of black ashlar marble, shrouded 
in awe and horror, as Gray gives it us ; no, 
rough as the North rocks, as the Iceland des^ 
erts, it is ; with a heartiness, homeliness, even 
a tint of good-humor and robust mirth in the 
middle of these fearful things. The strong old 
Norse heart did not go upon theatrical sublim- 
ities; they had not time to tremble. I like 
much their robust simplicity; their veracity, 
directness of conception. Thor 'draws down 
his brows' in a veritable Norse rage; 'grasps 
his hammer till the knuckles grow white.' 
Beautiful traits of pity, too, an honest pity. 
Balder 'the white God' dies; the beautiful, 
benignant; he is the Sungod. They try all 
Nature for a remedy; but he is dead. Frigga, 
his mother, sends Hermoder to seek or see 
him: nine days and nine nights he rides 
through gloomy deep valleys, a labyrinth of 
gloom; arrives at the Bridge with its gold 
roof; the Keeper says, "Yes, Balder did pass 
here ; but the Kingdom of the Dead is down 
yonder, far toward the North.' Hermoder 
rides on; leaps Hell-gate, Hela's gate; does 
see Balder, and speak with him : Balder can- 
not be delivered. Inexorable ! Hela will not, 
for Odin or any God, give him up. The beau- 
tiful and gentle has to remain there. His Wife 
had volunteered to go with him, to die with 
him. They shall forever remain there. He 
sends his ring to Odin; Nanna his wife sends 
her thimble to Frigga, as a remembrance — Ah 
me! — 

For, indeed, Valor is the fountain of Pity, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 51 

too;— of Truth and all that is great and good 
in man. The robust homely vigor of the 
Norse heart attaches one much, in these delin- 
eations. Is it not a trait of right honest 
strength, says Uhland, who has written a fine 
Essay on Thor, that the old Norse heart finds 
its friend in the Thunder-god? That it is not 
frightened away by his thunder; but finds that 
Summer-heat, the beautiful noble summer, 
must and will have thunder withal. The Norse 
heart loves this Thor and his hammer-bolt; 
sports with him. Thor is Summer-heat; the 
god of Peaceable Industry as well as Thunder. 
He is the Peasant's friend; his true henchman 
and attendant is Thialfi, Manual Labor. Thor 
himself engages in all manner of rough manual 
work, scorns no business for its plebeianism ; 
is ever and anon traveling to the country of 
the Jotuns, harrying those chaotic Frost-mon- 
sters, subduing them, at least straitening and 
damaging them. There is a great broad 
humor in some of these things. 

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jotun-land, 
to seek Hymir's Caldron, that the Gods may 
brew beer. Hymir the huge Giant enters, his 
gray beard all full of hoar-frost ; splits pillars 
with the very glance of his eye ; Thor, after 
much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it 
on his head; the 'handles of it reach down to 
his heels.' The Norse Skald has a kind of 
loving sport with Thor. This is the Hymir 
whose cattle, the critics have discovered, are 
Icebergs. Huge untutored Brobdignag genius 
— needing only to be tamed-down ; into Shake- 



52 LECTURES ON HEROES. 



speares, Dantes, Goethes! It is all gone now, 
that old Norse work, — Thor the Thunder-god 
changed into Jack the Giant-killer; but the 
mind that made it is here yet. How strangely 
things grow, and die and do not die! There 
are twigs of that great world-tree of Norse 
Belief still curiously traceable. This poor Jack 
of the Nursery, with his miraculous shoes of 
swiftness, coat of darkness, sword of sharpness, 
he is one. Hynde Etin, and still more, decis- 
ively Red Etin of Ireland, in the Scottish Bal- 
lads, these are both derived from Nbrseland; 
Etin is evidently a Jotun. Nay, Shakespeare's 
Hamlet is a twig too of this same world-tree; 
there seems no doubt of that. Hamlet, Am- 
leth,»I find, is really a mythic personage; and 
his Tragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisoned 
asleep by drops in his ear, and the rest, is a 
Norse myth us! Old Saxo, as his wont was, 
made it a Danish history ; Shakespeare, out of 
Saxo, made it what we see. That is a twig of 
the world-tree that has grown, I think; — by 
nature or accident that one has grown! 

In fact, these old Norse songs have a truth 
in them, an inward perennial truth and great- 
ness, — as, indeed, all must have that can very 
long preserve itself by tradition alone. It is 
a greatness not of mere body and gigantic 
bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is 
a sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable 
in these old hearts. A great free glance into 
the very deeps of thought. They seem to 
have seen, these brave old Northmen, what 
Meditation has taught all men in all ages. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 53 

That this world is after all but a show, — a 
phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. 
All deep souls see into that, — the Hindoo 
Mythologist, the German Philosopher, — the 
Shakespeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever 
he may be : 

'We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!' 

One of Thor's expeditions, to Utgard (the 
Outer Garden, central seat of Jotun-land), is 
remarkable in this respect. Thialfi was with 
him, and Loke. After various adventures, 
they entered upon Giant-land ; wandered over 
plains, wild uncultivated places, among stones 
and trees. At nightfall they noticed a house ; 
and as the door, which indeed formed one 
whole side of the house, was open, they 
entered. It was a simple habitation ; one large 
hall, altogether empty. They stayed there. 
Suddenly in the dead of the night loud noises 
alarmed them. Thor grasped his hammer; 
stood in the door, prepared for fight. His 
companions within ran hither and thither in 
their terror, seeking some outlet in that rude 
hall ; they found a little closet at last, and took 
refuge there. Neither had Thor any battle: 
for, lo, in the morning it turned out that the 
noise had been only the snoring of a certain 
enormous but peaceable Giant, the Giant 
Skrymir, who lay peaceably sleeping near by; 
and this that they took for a house was merely 
his Glove, thrown aside there; the door was 
the Glove-wrist; the little closet they had fled 



54 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

into was the Thumb! Such a glove; — I remark 
too that it had not fingers as ours have, but 
only a thumb, and the rest undivided: a most 
ancient, rustic glove ! 

Skrymer now carried their portmanteau all 
day; Thor, however, had his own suspicions, 
did not like the ways of Skrymir; determined 
at night to put an end to him as he slept. Rais- 
ing his hammer, he struck down into the 
Giant's face a right thunderbolt blow, of force 
to rend rocks. The Giant merely awoke; 
rubbed his cheek, and said, Did a leaf fall? 
Again Thor struck, so soon as Skrymir again 
slept; a better blow than before; but the 
Giant only murmured, Was that a grain of 
sand? Thor's third stroke was with both his 
hands (the 'knuckles white' I suppose), and 
seemed to dint deep into Skrymir's visage; 
but he merely checked his snore, and remarked, 
There must be sparrows roosting in this tree, 
I think; what is that they have dropt? — At 
the gate of Utgard, a place so high that you 
had to 'strain your neck bending back to see 
the top of it, ' Skrymer went his ways. Thor 
and his companions were admitted; invited 
to take share in the games going on. To Thor, 
for his part, they handed a Drinking-horn ; it 
was a common feat, they told him, to drink 
this dry at one draught. Long and fiercely, 
three times over, Thor drank ; but made hardly 
any impression. He was a weak child, they 
told him: could he lift that Cat he saw thee? 
Small as the feat seemed, Thor with his whole 
godlike strength could not; he bent-up the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 55 

creature's back, could not raise its feet off the 
ground, could at the utmost raise one foot. 
Why, you are no man, said the Utgard people ; 
there is an Old Woman that will wrestle you. 
Thor, heartily ashamed, seized this haggard Old 
Woman ; but could not throw her. 

And now, on their quitting Utgard, the chief 
Jotun, escorting them politely a little way, 
said to Thor: "You are beaten then: — yet be 
not so much ashamed ; there was a deception 
of appearance in it. That Horn you tried to 
drink was the Sea; you did make it ebb; but 
who could drink that, the bottomless! The 
Cat you would have lifted, — why, that is the 
Midgard-snake, the Great World-serpent, 
which, tail in mouth, girds and keeps-up the 
whole created world; had you torn that up, 
the world must have rushed to ruin ! As for 
the Old Woman, she was Time, Old Age, 
Duration: with her what can wrestle? No man 
nor no god with her; gods or men, she pre- 
vails over all ! And then those three strokes 
you struck, — look at these three valleys; your 
:three strokes made these!" Thor looked at 
his attendant Jotun: it was Skrymir; — it was, 
say Norse critics, the old chaotic rocky Earth 
in person, and that glove-house was some 
r Earth-cavern! But Skrymir had vanished; 
[Utgard with its sky -high gates, when Thor 
grasped his hammer to smite them, had gone 
to air; only the Giant's voice was heard mock- 
ing: "Better come no more to Jotunheim!" — 

This is of the allegoric period, as we see, and 
half play, not of the prophetic and entirely 



56 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

devout : but as mythus is there not real antique 
Norse gold in it? More true metal, rough 
from the Mimer-stithy, than in many a famed 
Greek Mythus shaped far better! A great 
broad Brobdignag grin of true humor is in 
this Skrymir; mirth resting on earnestness 
and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest : 
only a right valiant heart is capable of that. 
It is the grim humor of our own Ben Jonson, 
rare old Ben ; runs in the blood of us, I fancy • 
for one catches tones of it, under a still other 
shape, out of the American Backwoods. 

That is also a very striking conception that 
of the Ragnarok, Consummation, or Twilight 
of the Gods. It is in the Volnspa Song ; seem- 
ingly a very old, prophetic idea. The Gods 
and Jotuns, the divine Powers and the chaotic 
brute ones, after long contest and partial vic- 
tory by the former, meet at last in universal 
world-embracing wrestle and duel ; World-ser- 
pent against Thor, strength against strength ; 
mutually instinctive; and ruin, 'twilight,' 
sinking into darkness, swallows the created 
Universe. The old Universe with its Gods is 
sunk ; but it is not final death : there is to be 
a new Heaven and a new Earth; a higher 
supreme God, and Justice to reign among 
men. Curious; this law of mutation, which 
also is a law written in man's inmost thought, 
had been deciphered by these old earnest 
Thinkers in their rude style ; and how, though 
all dies, and even gods die, yet all death is but 
a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the 
Greater and the Better! It is the fundamental 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 57 

Law of Being for a creature made of Time, 
living in this Place of Hope. All earnest men 
have seen into it ; may still see into it. 

And now, connected with this, let us glance 
at the last my thus of the appearance of Thor; 
and end there. I fancy it to be the latest in 
date of all these fables; a sorrowing protest 
against the advance of Christianity, — set forth 
reproachfully by some Conservative Pagan. 
King Olaf has been harshly blamed for his 
over- zeal in introducing Christianity; surely I 
should have blamed him far more for an 
under-zeal in that! He paid dear enough for 
it, he died by the revolt of his Pagan people, 
in battle, in the year 1033, at Stickelstad, near 
that Drontheim, where the chief Cathedral of 
the North has now stood for many centuries, 
dedicated gratefully to his memory as Saint 
Olaf. The Mythus about Thor is to this effect. 
King Olaf, the Christian Reform King, is sail- 
ing with fit escort along the shore of Norway, 
from haven to haven; dispensing justice, or 
doing other royal work : on leaving a certain 
haven, it is found that a stranger, of grave 
eyes and aspect, red beard, of stately robust 
figure, has stept in. The courtiers address 
him ; his answers surprise by their pertinency 
and depth: at length he is brought to the King. 
The stranger's conversation here is not less 
remarkable, as they sail along the beautiful 
shore ; but after some time, he addresses King 
Olaf thus: "Yes, King Olaf, it is all beautiful, 
with the sun shining on it there; green, fruit- 
ful, a right fair home for you ; and . many a 



58 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

sore day had Thor, many a wild fight with the 
rock Jotuns, before he could make it so. And 
now you seem minded to put away Thor. 
King Olaf, have a care!" said the stranger, 
drawing-down his brows; — and when they 
looked again, he was nowhere to be found. — 
This is the last appearance of Thor on the 
stage of this world ! 

Do we not see well enough how the Fable 
might arise, without unveracity on the part 
of any one? It is the way most gods have 
come to appear among men: thus, if in Pin- 
dar's time 'Neptune was seen once at the 
Nemean Games,' what was this Neptune too 
but a 'stranger of noble grave aspect,' — fit to 
be 'seen'! There is something pathetic, tragic 
for me in this last voice of Paganism. Thor 
is vanished, the whole Norse world has van- 
ished; and will not return ever again. In like 
fashion to that pass away the highest things. 
All things that have been in this world, all 
things that are or will be in it, have to vanish : 
we have our sad farewell to give them. 

That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest, 
sternly impressive Consecration of Valor (so we 
may define it), sufficed for these old valiant 
Northmen. Consecration of Valor is not a bad 
thing ! We will take it for good, so far as it goes. 
Neither is there no use in knowing something 
about this old Paganism of our Fathers. 
Unconsciously, and combined with higher 
things, it is in us yet, that old Faith withal! 
To know it consciously, brings us into closer 
and clearer relation with the Past, — with 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 59 

our own possessions in the Past. For the 
whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the posses- 
sion of the Present; the Past had always some- 
thing true, and is a precious possession. In a 
different time, and in a different place, it is 
always some other side of our common Human 
Nature that has been developing itself. The 
actual True is the sum of all these ; not any 
one of them by itself constitutes what of 
Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better 
to know them all than misknow them. "To 
which of these Three Religions do you spe- 
cially adhere?" inquires Meister of his Teacher. 
4 'To all the Three!" answers the other: "To 
all the Three; for they by their union first 
constitute the True Religion. ' ' 



LECTURE II. 

THE HERO AS PROPHET. MAHOMET ISLAM. 

[Friday, 8th May, 1840.] 

i?rom the first rude times of Paganism among 
the Scandinavians in the North, we advance to 
a very different epoch of religion, among a 
very different people : Mahometanism among 
the Arabs. A great change; what a change 
and progress is indicated here, in the universal 
condition and thoughts of men! The Hero is 
not now regarded as a God among his fellow- 
men; but as one God-inspired, as a Prophet. 
It is the second phasis of Hero-worship: the 
first or oldest, we may say, has passed away 
without return; in the history of the world 
there will not again be any man, never so 
great, whom his fellow-men will take for a 
god. Nay, we might rationally ask, Did any 
set of human beings ever really think the man 
they saw there standing beside them a god, 
the maker of this world? Perhaps not: it was 
usually some man they remembered, or had 
seen. But neither can this any more be. The 
Great Man is not recognized henceforth as a 
god any more. 

It was a rude gross error, that of counting 
the Great Man a god. Yet let us say that it 
is at all times difficult to know what he is, or 
.60 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 61 

how to account of him and receive him ! The 
most significant feature in the history of an 
epoch is the manner it has of welcoming" a 
Great Man. Ever, to the true instincts of 
men, there is something godlike in him. 
Whether they shall take him to be a god, to be 
a prophet, or what they shall take him to be? 
that is ever a grand question ; by their way of 
answering that, we shall see. as through a 
little window, into the very heart of these 
men's spiritual condition. For at bottom the 
Great Man, as he comes from the hand of 
Nature, is ever the same kind of thing : Odin, 
Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it 
appear that these are all originally of one stuff; 
that only by the world's reception of them, 
and the shapes they assume, are they so im- 
measurably diverse. The worship of Odin 
astonishes us, —to fall prostrate before the 
Great Man, into deliquium of love and wonder 
over him, and feel in their hearts that he was 
a denizon of the skies, a god! This was imper- 
fect enough: but to welcome, for example, a 
Burns as we did, was that what we can call 
perfect? The most precious gift that Heaven 
can give to the Earth; a man of 'genius' as 
we call it; the Soul of a Man actually sent 
down from the skies with a God's-message to 
us, — this we waste away as an idle artificial 
firework, sent to amuse us a little, and sink 
into ashes, wreck and ineff ectuality : such 
reception of a Great Man I do not call very 
perfect either ! Looking into the heart of the 
thing, one may perhaps call that of Burns a 



62 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

still uglier phenomenon, betokening still sad- 
der imperfections in mankind's ways, than the 
Scandinavian method itself! To fall into mere 
unreasoning deliquium of love and admira- 
tion, was not good ; but such unreasoning, nay 
irrational supercilious no-love at all is perhaps 
still worse! — It is a thing forever changing, 
this of Hero-worship: different in each age, 
difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the 
heart of the whole business of the age, one 
may say, is to do it well. 

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most 
eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest 
to speak of. He is by no means the truest of 
Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one. 
Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming 
any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the 
good of him I justly can. It is the way to get 
at his secret : let us try to understand what he 
meant with the world; what the world meant 
and means with him, will then be a more 
answerable question. One current hypothesis 
about Mahomet, that he was a scheming im- 
poster, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion 
is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins 
really to be now untenable to any one. The 
lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped 
round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves 
only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, 
Where the proof was of that story of the 
pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's 
ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? 
Grotius answered that there was no proof ! It I 
is really time to dismiss all that. The word 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 63 

this man spoke has been the life-guidance now 
of a hundred-and-eighty millions of men these 
twelve-hundred years. These hundred-and 
I eighty millions were made by God as well as 
v we. A greater number of God's creatures 
/ believe in Mahomet's word at this hour than 
f in any other word whatever. Are we to sup- 
pose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual 
legerdemain, this which so many creatures of 
the Almighty have lived by and died by? I, 
for my part, cannot form any such supposi- 
tion. I will believe most things sooner than 
.that. One would be entirely at a loss what to 
think of this world at all, if quackery so grew 
A and were sanctioned here. 

Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If 
we would attain to knowledge of anything in 
| God's true Creation, let us disbelieve them 
] wholly ! They are the product of an Age of 
I Scepticism ; they indicate the saddest spiritual 
! paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of 
rmen: more godless theory, I think, was never 
[promulgated in this Earth. A false man 
t found a religion! Why, a false man cannot 
build a brick house ! If he do not know and 
follow truly the properties of mortar, burnt 
clay and what else he works in, it is no house 
that he makes, but a rubbish heap. It will 
not stand for twelve centuries, to lodge a hun- 
dred-and-eighty millions; it will fall straight- 
way. A man must conform himself to Nature's 
Jaws, be verily in communion with Nature 
1 and the truth of things, or Nature will answer 
trim, No, not at all! Speciosities are specious 



64 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

— ah, me ! — a Cagliostro, many Cagliostros, 
prominent world-leaders, do prosper by their 
quackery, for a day. It is like a forged bank- 
note ; they get it passed out of their worthless 
hands: others, not they, have to smart for it. 
Nature bursts-up in fire-flames, French Revo- 
lutions and such-like, proclaiming with terrible 
veracity that forged notes are forged. 

But of a Great Man especially, of him I will 
venture to assert that it is incredible he should 
have been other than true. It seems to me 
the primary foundation of him, and of all that 
can lie in him, this. No Mirabeau, Napoleon, 
Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do any- 
thing, but is first of all in right earnest about 
it; what I call a sincere man. I should say 
sincerely, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is 
the first characteristic of all men in any way 
heroic. Not the sincerity that calls itself sin- 
cere ; ah, no, that is a very poor matter indeed ; 
— a shallow braggart conscious sincerity; 
oftenest self-conceit mainly. The Great Man's 
sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is 
not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is con- 
scious rather of insincerity; for what man can 
walk accurately by the law of truth for one 
day? No, the Great Man does not boast him- 
self sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask 
himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sin- 
cerity does not depend on himself; he cannot 
help being sincere ! The great Fact of Exist- . 
ence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot 
get out of the awful presence of this Reality. < 
His mind is so made; he is great by that, first 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 65 

of all. Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, 
real as Death, is this Universe to him. 
Though all men should forget its truth, and 
walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all mo- 
ments the Flame-image glares-in upon him; 
undeniable, there, there ! — I wish you to take 
this as my primary definition of a Great Man. 
A little man may have this, it is competent to 
all men that God has made : but a Great Man 
cannot be without it. 

Such a man is what we call an original man; 
he comes to us at first-hand. A messenger 
he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tid- 
ings to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, 
God ; — in one way or other, we all feel that the 
words he utters are as no other man's words. 
Direct from the Inner Fact of things; — he 
lives, and has to live, in daily communion with 
that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him ; he 
is blind, homeless, miserable, following hear- 
says ; it glares-in upon him. Really his utter- 
ances, are they not a kind of 'revelation;' — 
what we must call such for want of some other 
name? It is from the heart of the world that 
he comes, he is portion of the primal reality of 
things. God has made many revelations: but 
this man too, has not God made him, the latest 
and newest of all? The 'inspiration of the 
Almighty giveth him understanding:' we must 
listen before all to him. 

This Mahomet, then, we will in no wise 
consider as an Inanity and Theatricality, a 
poor conscious ambitious schemer; we cannot 
conceive him so. The rude message he deliv- 

5 Heroes 



66 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ered was a real one withal ; an earnest con- 
fused voice from the unknown Deep. The 
man's words were not false, nor his workings 
here below; no Inanity and Simulacrum; a 
fiery mass of Life cast-up from the great bosom 
of Nature herself. To kindle the world; the 
world's Maker had ordered it so. Neither can 
the faults, imperfections, insincerities even, 
of Mahomet, if such were never so well proved 
against him, shake this primary fact about him. 
On the whole, we make too much of faults : 
the details of the business hide the real center 
of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should 
say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of 
the Bible above all, one would think, might 
know better. Who is called there 'the man 
according to God's own heart?' David, the 
Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough; 
blackest crimes; there was no want of sins. 
And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask, 
Is this your man according to God's heart? 
The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shal- 
low one. What are faults, what are the out- 
ward details of a life ; if the inner secret of it, 
the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, 
never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten? 'It 
is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. ' 
Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the 
most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were 
that same supercilious consciousness of no sin; 
—that is death; the heart so conscious is 
divorced from sincerity, humility and fact: is 
dead: it is 'pure' as dead dry sand is pure. 
David's life and history, as written for us in 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 67 

those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest 
emblem ever given of a man's moral progress 
and warfare here below. All earnest souls 
will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of 
an earnest human soul toward what is good 
and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, 
down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle never 
ended, ever with tears, repentance, true, 
unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor 
human nature! Is not a man's walking, in 
truth, always that: 4 a succession of. falls?' 
Man can do no other. In this wild element of 
a Life, he has to struggle onward; now 
fallen, deep-abased; and ever, with tears, 
repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise 
again, struggle again still onward. That his 
struggle be a faithful unconquerable one : that 
is the question of questions. We will put-up* 
with rqany sad details, if the soul of it were 
true. Details by themselves will never teach 
us what it is. I believe we misestimate 
Mahomet's faults, even as faults: but the secret 
of him will never be got by dwelling there. 
We will leave all this behind us; and assuring 
ourselves that he did mean some true thing, 
ask candidly what it was or might be. 

These Arabs Mahomet was born among are 
certainly a notable people. Their country 
itself is notable; the fit habitation for such a 
race. Savage inaccessible rock-mountains, 
great grim deserts, alternating with beautiful 
strips of verdure : wherever water is, there is 
greenness, beauty; odoriferous balm-shrubs, 



68 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider that 
wide waste horizon of sand, empty, silent, like 
a sand-sea, dividing habitable place from 
habitable. You are all alone there, left alone 
with the Universe ; by day a fierce sun blazing 
down on it with intolerable radiance ; by night 
the great deep Heaven with its stars. Such a 
country is fit for a swift-handed, deep-hearted 
race of men. There is something most agile, 
active, and yet most meditative, enthusiastic 
in the Arab character. The Persians are 
called the French of the East; we call the 
Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted, noble 
people ; a people of wild strong feelings, and 
of iron restraint over these: the characteristic 
of noble-mindedness, of genius. The wild 
Bedouin welcomes the stranger to his tent, as 
one having right to all that is there ; were it 
his worst enemy, he will slay his foal to treat 
him, will serve him with sacred hospitality for 
three days, will set him fairly on his way: — 
and then, by another law as sacred, kill him if 
he can. In words, too, as in action. They are 
not a loquacious people, taciturn rather; but 
eloquent, gifted when they do speak. An 
earnest, truthful kind of men. They are, as 
we know, of Jewish kindred: but with that 
deadly terrible earnestness of tke Jews they 
seem to combine something graceful, brilliant, 
which is not Jewish. They had * Poetic con- 
tests' among them before the time of Mahomet. 
Sale says, at Ocadh, in the South of Arabia, 
there were yearly fairs, and there, when the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 69 

merchandising was done, Poets sang for prizes: 
— the wild people gathered to hear that. 

One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest; 
the outcome of many or of all high qualities: 
what we may call religiosity. From of old 
they had been zealous worshipers, according 
to their light. They worshiped the stars, as 
Sabeans: worshiped many natural objects, — 
recognized them as symbols, immediate mani- 
festations, of the Maker of Nature. It was 
wrong; and yet not wholly wrong. All God's 
works are still in a sense symbols of God. Do 
we not, as I urged, still account it a merit to 
recognize a certain inexhaustible significance, 
'poetic beauty' as we name it, in all natural 
objects whatsoever? A man is a poet, and 
honored, for doing that, and speaking or sing- 
ing it, — a kind of diluted worship. They had 
many Prophets, these Arabs; Teachers, each 
to his tribe, each according to the light he 
had. But indeed, have we not from of old the 
noblest of proofs, still palpable to every one 
of us, of what devoutness and nobleminded- 
ness had dwelt in these rustic thoughtful 
peoples? Biblical critics seem agreed that our 
own Book of Job was written in that region of 
the world. I call that, apart from all theories 
about it, one the grandest things ever written 
with pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not 
Hebrew; such a noble universality, different 
from noble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns 
in it.- A noble Book; all men's Book. It is 
our first, oldest statement of the never-ending 
Problem, — man's destiny, and God's ways with 



70 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

him here in this earth. And all in such free 
flowing outlines; grand in its sincerity, in its 
simplicity ; in its epic melody, and repose of 
reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the 
mildly understanding heart. So true every- 
way; true eyesight and vision for all things; 
material things no less than spiritual: the 
Horse, — l hast thou clothed his neck with thun- 
der?' — he 'laughs at the shaking of the spear!' 
Such living likenesses were never since drawn. 
Sublime sorrow, sublime reconciliation ; oldest 
choral melody as of the heart of mankind ; — so 
soft, and great; as the summer midnight, as 
the world with its seas and stars! There is 
nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of 
it, of equal literary merit. — 

To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most 
ancient universal objects of worship was that 
Black Stone, still kept in the building called 
Caabah at Mecca. Diodorus Siculus mentions 
this Caabah in a way not to be mistaken, as 
the oldest, most honored temple in his time ; 
that is, some half century before our Era. 
Silvestre de Sacy says there is some likelihood 
that the Black Stone is an aerolite. In that 
case, some man might see it fall out of Heaven ! 
It stands now beside the Well Zemzem ; the 
Caabah is built over both. A Well is in all 
places a beautiful affecting object, gushing 
out like life from the hard earth ; — still more 
so in those hot dry countries, where it is the 
first condition of being. The Well Zemzem 
has its name from the bubbling sound of the 
waters, zem-zem; they think it is the Well 



LECTURES OxN HEROES. 71 

which Hagar found with her little Ishmael in 
the wilderneSvS: the aerolite and it have been 
sacred now, and had a Caabah over them, for 
thousands of years. A curious object, that 
Caabah ! There it stands at this hour, in the 
black cloth-covering the Sultan sends it yearly; 
'twenty-seven cubits high;' with circuit, with 
double circuit of pillars with festoon-rows of 
lamps and quaint ornaments; the lamps will 
be lighted again this night, — to glitter again 
under the stars. An authentic fragment of 
the oldest Cast. It is the Keblah of all Moslem : 
from Delhi all onward to Morocco, the eyes of 
innumerable praying men are turned toward 
it, five times, this day and all days: one of the 
notablest centers in the Habitation of Men. 

It had been from the sacredness attached to 
this Caabah Stone and Hagar's Well, from the 
pilgrimings of all tribes of Arabs thither, that 
Mecca took its rise as a Town. A great town 
once, though much decayed now. It has no 
natural advantage for a town; stands in a 
sandy hollow amid bare barren hills, at a dis- 
tance from the sea; its provisions, its very 
bread, have to be imported. But so many pil- 
grims needed lodgings: and then all places of 
pilgrimage do, from the first, become places 
of trade. The first day pilgrims meet, mer- 
chants have also met: where men see them- 
selves assembled for one object, they find that 
they can accomplish other objects which 
depend on meeting together. Mecca became 
the Fair of all Arabia. And thereby indeed 
the chief staple and warehouse of whatever 



72 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Commerce there was between the Indian and 
the Western countries, Syria, Egypt, even 
Italy. It had at one time a population of ioo,- 
ooo : buyers, forwarders of those Eastern and 
Western products; importers for their own 
behoof of provisions and corn. The govern- 
ment was a kind of irregular aristocratic 
republic, not without a touch of theocracy. 
Ten Men of a chief tribe, chosen in some rough 
way, were Governors of Mecca, and Keepers of 
the Caabah. The Koreish were the chief tribe 
in Mahomet's time; his own family was of that 
tribe. The rest of the Nation, fractioned and 
cut-asunder by deserts, lived under similar 
rude patriarchal governments by one or sev- 
eral: herdsmen, carriers, traders, generally 
robbers, too; being oftenest at war one with 
another, or with all : held together by no open 
bond, if it were not this meeting at the Caabah, 
where all forms of Arab Idolatry assembled in 
common adoration; — held mainly by the 
inward indissoluble bond of a common blood 
and language. In this way had the Arabs 
lived for long ages, unnoticed by the world ; a 
people of great qualities, unconsciously wait- 
ing for the day when they should become not- 
able to all the world. Their Idolatries appear 
to have been in a tottering state; much was 
getting into confusion and fermentation among 
them. Obscure tidings of the most important 
Event ever transacted in this world, the Life 
and Death of the Divine Man in Judea, at once 
the symptom and cause of immeasurable change 
to all people in the world, had in the course of 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 73 

centuries reached into Arabia too ; and could 
not but, of itself, have produced fermentation 
there. 

It was among this Arab people, so circum- 
stanced, in the year 570 of our Era, that the 
man Mahomet was born. He was of the fam- 
ily of Hashem, of the Koreish tribe as we said ; 
though poor, connected with the chief persons 
of his country. Almost at his birth he lost his 
Father; at the age of six years his Mother too, 
a woman noted for her beauty, her worth and 
sense : he fell to the charge of his Grandfather, 
and old man, a hundred years old. A good 
old man: Mahomet's Father, Abdallah, had 
been his youngest favorite son. He saw in 
Mahomet with his old life- worn eyes, a century 
old, the lost Abdallah come back again, all that 
was left of Abdallah. He loved the little 
orphan Boy greatly; used to say, They must 
take care of that beautiful little Boy, nothing 
in their kindred was more precious than he. 
At his death, while the boy was still but two 
years old, he left him in charge to Abu Thaleb 
the eldest of the Uncles, as to him that now 
was head of the house. By this Uncle, a just 
and rational man as everything betokens, 
Mahomet was brought up in the best Arab 
way. 

Mahomet, as he grew up, accompanied his 
Uncle on trading journeys and suchlike; in 
his eighteenth year one finds him a fighter fol- 
lowing his Uncle in war. But perhaps the 
most significant of all his journeys is one we 

fi Heroes 



74 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

find noted as of some years' earlier date: a 
journey to the Fairs of Syria. The young 
man here first came in contact with a quite 
foreign world, — with one foreign element of 
endless moment to him : the Christian Religion. 
I know not what to make of that 'Sergius, the 
Nestorian Monk,' whom Abu Thaleb and he 
are said to have lodged with ; or how much 
any monk could have taught one still so young. 
Probably enough it is greatly exaggerated, 
this of the Nestorian Monk. Mahomet was 
only fourteen ; had no language but his own : 
much in Syria must have been a strange unin- 
telligible whirlpool to him. But the eyes of 
the lad were open ; glimpses of many things 
would doubtless be taken-in, and lie very 
enigmatic as yet, which were to ripen in a 
strange way into views, into beliefs and 
insights one day. These journeys to Syria 
were probably the beginning of much to 
Mahomet. 

One other circumstance we must not forget : 
that he had no school-learning; of the thing we 
call school-learning, none at all. The art of 
writing has but just introduced into Arabia; it 
seems to be the true opinion that Mahomet 
never could write! Life in the Desert, with 
its experiences, was all his education. What 
of this infinite Universe he, from his dim place, 
with his own eyes and thoughts, could take in, 
so much and no more of it was he to know. 
Curious, if he will reflect on it, this of having 
no books. Except by what he could see for 
himself, or hear of by uncertain rumor of 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 75 

speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he 
could know nothing. The wisdom that had 
been before him or at a distance from him in 
the world, was in a manner as good as not 
there for him. Of the great brother souls, 
flame-beacons through so many lands and 
times, no one directly communicates with this 
great soul. He is alone there, deep down in 
the bosom of the Wilderness ; has to grow up 
so, — alone with Nature and his own Thoughts. 
But from an early age, he had been 
remarked as a thoughtful man. His compan- 
ions named him "Al Amin, The Faithful. " A 
man of truth and fidelity; true in what he did, 
in what he spake and thought. They noted 
that he always meant something. A man 
rather taciturn in speech; silent when there 
was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise, 
sincere, when he did speak; always throwing 
light on the matter. This is the only sort of 
speech worth speaking! Through life we find 
him to have been regarded as an altogether 
solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious, 
sincere character; yet amiable, cordial, com- 
panionable, jocose even ; — a good laugh in him 
withal: there are men whose laugh is as 
untrue as anything about them; who cannot 
laugh. One hears of Mahomet's beauty: his 
fine sagacious honest face, brown florid 
complexion, beaming black eyes ; — I somehow 
like too that vein on the brow, which swelled- 
up black when he was in anger: like the 
'horse-shoe vein' in Scott's Red-gauntlet. It 
was a kind feature in the Hashem family, this 



76 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

black swelling vein in the brow; Mahomet 
had it prominent, as would appear. A spon- 
taneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning 
man ! Full of wild faculty, fire and light ; of 
wild worth, all uncultured; working out his 
life-task in the depths of the Desert there. 

How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich 
Widow, as her Steward, and traveled in her 
business, again to the Fairs of Syria ; how he 
managed all, as one can well understand, with 
fidelity, adroitness; how her gratitude, her 
regard for him grew : the story of their mar- 
riage is altogether a graceful intelligible one, as 
told us by the Arab authors. He was twenty- 
five; she forty, though still beautiful. He 
seems to have lived in a most affectionate, 
peaceable, wholesome way with this wedded 
benefactress; loving her truly and her alone. 
It goes greatly against the imposter theory, 
the fact that he lived in this entirely unex- 
ceptionable, entirely quiet and common- 
place way, till the heat of his years was 
done. He was forty before he talked of 
any mission from Heaven. All his irregular- 
ities, real and supposed, date from after his 
fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. 
All his 'ambition,' seemingly, had been, 
hitherto, to live an honest life; his 'fame,' 
the mere good opinion of neighbors that knew 
him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not till he 
was already getting old, the prurient heat of 
his life all burnt out, and peace growing to be 
the chief thing this world could give him, did 
he start on the 'career of ambition;' and, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 77 

belying all his past character and existence, 
set-up as a wretched empty charlatan to 
acquire what he could now no longer enjoy! 
For my share, I have no faith whatever in that. 
Ah, no: this deep-hearted Son of the Wilder- 
ness, with his beaming black eyes and open 
social deep soul, had other thoughts in him 
than ambition. A silent great soul; he was 
one of those who cannot but be in earnest; 
whom Nature herself has appointed to be 
sincere. While others walk in formulas and 
hearsays, contented enough to dwell there, 
this man could not screen himself in formulas ; 
he was alone with his own soul and the reality 
of things. The great mystery of Existence, 
as I said, glared-in upon him, with its terrors, 
with its splendors; no hearsays could hide 
that unspeakable fact, "Here am I!" -Such 
sincerity, as we named it, has in very truth 
something of divine. The word of such a man 
is a Voice direct from Nature's own Heart. 
Men do and must listen to that as to nothing 
else; — all else is wind in comparison. From 
of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrimings 
and wanderings, had been in this man: What 
am I? What is this unfathomable Thing I live 
in, which men name Universe? What is Life; 
what is Death? What am I to believe? What 
am I to do? The grim rocks of Mount Hara, 
of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes 
answered not. The great Heaven rolling 
silent overhead, with its blue-glancing stars 
answered not. There was no answer. The 



78 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

man's own soul, and what of God's inspiration 
dwelt there, had to answer! 

It is the thing which all men have to ask 
themselves; which we too have to ask, and an- 
swer. This wild man felt it to be of infinite 
moment ; all other things of no moment what- 
ever in comparison. The jargon of argumen- 
tative Greek Sects, vague traditions of Jews, 
the stupid routine of Arab Idolatry: there was 
no answer in these. A Hero, as I repeat, 
has this first distinction, which indeed we may 
call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of 
his whole Heroism, That he looks through the 
shows of things into things. Use and wont, 
respectable hearsay, respectable formula: all 
these are good, or are not good. There is 
something behind and beyond all these, which 
all these must correspond with, be the image 
of, or they are — Idolatries; 'bits of black wood 
pretending to be God;' to the earnest soul a 
mockery and abomination. Idolatries never 
so gilded, waited on by heads of the Koreish, 
will do nothing for this man. Though all men 
walk by them, what good is it? The great 
Reality stands glaring there upon him. He 
there has to answer to it, or perish miserably. 
Now, even now, or else through all Eternity 
never! Answer it; thou must find an answer. 
— Ambition? What could all Arabia do for this 
man ; with the crown of Greek Heraclius, of 
Persian Chosroes, and all crowns in the Earth ; 
— what could they all do for him? It was not 
of the Earth he wanted to hear tell ; it was of 
the Heaven above and of the Hell beneath. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 79 

All crowns and sovereignties whatsoever, where 
would they in a few brief years be? To the 
Sheik of Mecca or Arabia, and have a bit of 
gilt wood put into your hand, — will that be 
one's salvation? I decidedly think, not. We 
will leave it altogether, this impostor hypothe- 
sis, as not credible ; not very tolerable even, 
worthy chiefly of dismissal by us. 

Mahomet had been wont to retire yearly, 
during the month Ramadhan, into solitude and 
silence ; as indeed was the Arab custom ; a 
praiseworthy custom, which such a man, above 
all, would find natural and useful. Commun- 
ing with his own heart, in the silence of the 
mountains; himself silent; open to the 'small 
still voices:' it was a right natural custom! 
Mahomet was in his fortieth year, when hav- 
ing withdrawn to a cavern in Mount Hara, 
near Mecca, during this Ramadhan, to pass the 
month in prayer, and meditation on these great 
questions, he one day told his wife Kadijah, 
who with his household was with him or near 
rrim this year. That by the unspeakable 
special favor of Heaven he had now found it 
all out ; was in doubt and darkness no longer, 
but saw it all. That all these Idols and For- 
mulas were nothing, miserable bits of wood; 
that there was One God in and over all; and 
we must leave all Idols, and look to Him. 
That God is great; and that there is nothing 
else great! He is the Reality. Wooden Idols 
are not real ; He is real. He made us at first, 
sustains us yet ; we and all things are but the 
shadow of Him ; a transitory garment veiling 



80 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

the Eternal Splendor. 'Allah akbar, God is 
great;' — and then also 'Islam,,' That we must 
submit to God. That our whole strength lies 
in resigned submission to Him, whatsoever He 
do to us. For this world, and for the other ! 
The thing He sends to us, were it death and 
worse than death, shall be good, shall be best ; 
we resign ourselves to God — 'If this be Islam,' 
says Goethe, 'do we not all live in Islam?* 
Yes, all of us that have any mortal life ; we all 
live so. It has ever been held the highest wis- 
dom for a man not merely to submit to Neces- 
sity, — Necessity will make him submit, — but 
to know and believe well that the stern thing 
which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, 
the best, the thing wanted there. To cease 
his frantic pretension of scanning this great 
God's World in his small fraction of a brain; 
to know that it had verily, though deep be- 
yond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul 
of it was Good ; — that his part in it was to con- 
form to the Law of the Whole, and in devout 
silence follow that; not questioning it, obey- 
ing it as unquestionable. 

I say, this is yet the only true morality 
known. A man is right and invincible, virtu- 
ous and on the road toward sure conquest, pre- 
cisely while he joins himself to the great deep 
Law of the World, in spite of all superficial laws, 
temporary appearances, profit-and-loss calcula- 
tions; he is victorious while he co-operates 
with that great central Law, not victorious 
otherwise: — and surely his first chance of co- 
operating with-it, or getting into the course 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 81 

of it, is to know with his whole soul that it is; 
that it is good, and alone good ! This is the 
soul of Islam ; it is properly the soul of Christi- 
anity; — for Islam is definable as a confused 
form of Christianity; had Christianity not 
been, neither had it been. Christianity also 
commands us, before all, to be resigned to 
God. We are to take no counsel with flesh- 
and-blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain 
sorrows and wishes; to know that we know 
nothing ; that the worst and crudest to our 
eyes is not what it seems; that we have to re- 
ceive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God 
above, and say, It is good and wise, God is 
great! "Though He slay me, yet will I trust 
in Him." Islam means in its way Denial of 
Self, Annihilation of Self. This is yet the 
highest Wisdom that Heaven has revealed to 
our Earth/ 

Such light has come, as it could, to illumi- 
nate the darkness of this wild Arab soul. A 
confused dazzling splendor as of life and 
Heaven, in the great darkness which threat- 
ened to be death : he called it revelation and 
the angel Gabriel ; — who of us yet can know 
what to call it? It is the 'inspiration of the 
Almighty' that giveth us understanding. To 
know ; to get into the truth of anything, is 
ever a mystic act, — of which the best Logics 
can but babble on the surface. 'Is not Belief 
the true god-announcing Miracle?' says Nova- 
lis. — That Mahomet's whole soul, set in flame 
with this grand Truth vouchsafed him, should 
feel as if it were important and the only impor- 



82 LECTURES ON HEROES. 



tant thing, was very natural. That Providence 
had unspeakably honored him by revealing - it, 
saving him from death and darkness; that he 
therefore was bound to make known the same 
to all creatures: this is what was meant by 
'Mahomet is the Prophet of God;' this too is 
not without its true meaning. — 

The good Kadijah, we can fancy, listened to 
him with wonder, with doubt: at length she 
answered : Yes, it was true this that he said. 
One can fancy too the boundless gratitude of 
Mahomet ; and how of all the kindnesses she 
had done him, this of believing the earnest 
struggling word he now spoke was the great- 
est. 'It is certain,' says Novalis, 'my Convic- 
tion gains infinitely, the moment another soul 
will believe in it.' It is a boundless favor. — 
He never forgot this good Kadijah. Long 
afterward, Ayesha his young favorite wife, a 
woman who indeed distinguished herself 
among the Moslems, by all manner of quali- 
ties, through her whole long life : this young 
brilliant Ayesha was, one day, questioning 
him: "Now am not I better than Kadijah? 
She was a widow ; old, and had lost her looks : 
you love me better than you did her?" — "No, 
by Allah!" answered Mahomet; "No, by 
Allah! She believed in me when none else 
would believe. In the whole world I had but 
one friend, and she was that!" — Seid, his 
Slave, also believed in him; these with his 
young Cousin Ali, Abu Thaleb's son, were his 
first converts. 

He spoke of his Doctrine to this man and 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 83 

that; but the most treated it with ridicule, 
with indifference; in three years, I think, he 
had gained but thirteen followers. His prog- 
ress was slow enough. His encouragement to 
go on, was altogether the usual encouragement 
that such a man in such a case meets. After 
some three years of small success, he invited 
forty of his chief kindred to an entertainment; 
and there stood-up and told them what his pre- 
tension was: that he had this thing to promul- 
gate abroad to all men ; that it was the highest 
thing, the one thing: which of them Would, 
second him in that? Amid the doubt and 
silence of all, young Ali, as yet a lad of six- 
teen, impatient of the silence, started-up, and 
exclaimed in passionate fierce language, That 
he would! The assembly, among whom was 
Abu Thaleb, Ali's father, could not be un- 
friendly to Mahomet; yet the sight there, of 
one unlettered elderly man, with a lad of six- 
teen, deciding on such an enterprise, against 
all mankind, appeared ridiculous to them ; the 
assembly broke-up in laughter. Nevertheless 
it proved not a laughable thing; it was a very 
serious thing! As for this young Ali, one 
cannot but like him. A noble-minded crea- 
ture, as he shows himself, now and always 
afterward; full of affection, of fiery daring. 
Something chivalrous in him ; brave as a lion ; 
yet with a grace, a truth and affection worthy 
of Christian knighthood. He died by assassi- 
nation in the Mosque at Bagdad ; a death occa- 
sioned by his own generous fairness, confidence 
in the fairness of others: he said, If the wound 



84 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

proved not unto death, they must pardon the 
Assassin ; but if it did, then they must slay him 
straightway, that so they two in the same hour 
might appear before God, and see which side 
of that quarrel was the just one ! 

Mahomet naturally gave offense to the Kor- 
eish, Keepers of the Caabah, superintendents 
of the idols. One or two men of influence had 
joined him : the thing spread slowly, but it was 
spreading. Naturally he gave offense to 
everybody : Who is this that pretends to be 
wiser than we all ; that rebukes us all, as mere 
fools and worshipers of wood ! Abu Thaleb 
the good Uncle spoke with him : Could he not 
be silent about all that ; believe it all for him- 
self, and not trouble others, anger the chief 
men, endanger himself and them all, talking 
of it? Mahomet answered: If the Sun stood 
on his right hand and the Moon on his left, 
ordering him to hold his peace, he could not 
obey! No: there was something in this Truth 
he had got which was of Nature herself; equal 
in rank to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing 
Nature had made. It would speak itself there, 
so long as the Almighty allowed it, in spite of 
Sun and Moon, and all Koreish and all men 
and things. It must do that, and could do no 
other. Mahomet answered so ; and, they say, 
* burst into tears.' Burst into tears: he felt 
that Abu Thaleb was good to him ; that the 
task he had got was no soft, but a stern and 
great one. 

He went on speaking to who would listen to 
him ; publishing his doctrine among the pilgrims 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 85 

as they came to Mecca; gaining adherents in 
this pljace and that. Continual contradiction, 
hatred, open or secret danger attended him. 
His powerful relations protected Mahomet 
himself; but by and by, on his own advice, all 
his adherents had to quit Mecca, and seek 
refuge in Abyssinia over the sea. The Kor- 
eish grew ever angrier; laid plots, and swore 
oaths among them, to put Mahomet to death 
with their own hands. Abu Thaleb was dead, 
the good Kadi j ah was dead. Mahomet is not 
solicitous of sympathy from us; but his out- 
look at this time was one of the dismalest. He 
had to hide in caverns, escape in disguise ; fly 
hither and thither; homeless, in continual 
peril of his life. More than once it seemed all 
over with him ; more than once it turned on a 
straw, some rider's horse taking fright or the 
like, whether Mahomet and his Doctrine had 
not ended there, and not been heard of at all. 
But it was not to end so. 

In the thirteenth year of his mission, finding 
his enemies all banded against him, forty 
sworn men, one out of every tribe, waiting to 
take his life, and no continuance possible at 
Mecca for him any longer, Mahomet fled to the 
place then called Yathreb, where he had 
gained some adherents; the place they now call 
Medina or ' ' Medinat al Nabi, the City of the 
Prophet,' from that circumstance. It lay 
some 200 miles off, through rocks and deserts; 
not without great difficulty, in such mood as 
we may fancy, he escaped thither, and found 
welcome. The whole East dates its era from 



86 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

this Flight, Hegira as they name it : the Year 
i of this Hegira is 622 of our Era, the fifty- 
third of Mahomet's life. He was now becom- 
ing an old man ; his friends sinking round him 
one by one; his path desolate, encompassed 
with danger: unless he could find hope in his 
own heart, the outward face of things was but 
hopeless for him. It is so with all men in the 
like case. Hitherto Mahomet had professed 
to publish his Religion by the way of preach 
ing and persuasion alone. But now, driven 
foully out of his native country, since unjust 
men had not only given no ear to his earnest 
Heaven's message, the deep cry of his heart, 
but would not even let him live if he kept 
speaking it, — the wild Son of the Desert re- 
solved to defend himself, like a man and Arab. 
If the Koreish will have it so, they shall have 
it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite moment to 
them and all men, they would not listen to 
these; would trample them down by sheer vio- 
lence, steel and murder: well, let steel try it 
then! Ten years more this Mahomet had; all 
of fighting, of breathless impetuous toil and 
struggle ; with what result we know. 

Much has been said of Mahomet's propaga- 
ting his Religion by the sword. It is no doubt 
far nobler what we have to boast of the Chris- 
tian religion, that it propagated itself peace- 
ably in the way of preaching and conviction. 
Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of 
the truth or falsehood of a religion, there is a 
radical mistake in it. The sword indeed : but 
where will you get your sword! Every new 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 87 

opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minor- 
ity of one. In one man's head alone, there it 
dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole 
world believes it ; there is one man against all 
men. That he take a sword, and try to propa- 
gate with that, will do little for him. You 
must first get your sword! On the whole, a 
thing will propagate itself as it can. We do 
not find, of the Christian Religion either, that 
it always disdained the sword, when once it 
had got one. Charlemagne's conversion of 
the Saxons was not by preaching. I care little 
about the sword: I will allow a thing to strug- 
gle for itself in this world, with any sword or 
tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. 
We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and 
fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and 
do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it ; very 
sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer 
nothing which does not deserve to be con- 
quered. What is better than itself, it cannot 
put away, but only what is worse. In this 
great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can 
do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted 
in Nature, what we call truest, that thing 
and not the other will be found growing at last. 
Here however, in reference to much that 
there is in Mahomet and his success, we are to 
remember what an umpire Nature is; what a 
greatness, composure of depth and tolerance 
there is in her. You take wheat to cast into 
the Earth's bosom : your wheat may be mixed 
with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, 
dust and all imaginable rubbish ; no matter : 



88 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

you cast it into the kind just Earth ; she grows 
the wheat. — the whole rubbish she silently 
absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rub- 
bish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the 
good Earth is silent about all the rest — has 
silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, 
and makes no complaint about it! So every- 
where in Nature! She is true and not a lie; 
and yet so great, and just, and motherly in her 
truth. She requires of a thing only that it be 
genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will 
not if not so. There is a soul of truth in all 
the things she ever gave harbor to. Alas, is 
not this the history of all highest Truth that 
comes or ever came into the world? The body 
of them all is imperfection, an element of light 
in darkness: to us they have to come em- 
bodied in mere Logic, in some merely scientific 
Theorem of the Universe ; which cannot be 
complete; which cannot but be found, one 
day, incomplete; erroneous, and so die and 
disappear. The body of all Truth dies; and 
yet in all, I say, there is a soul which never 
dies; which in new and ever-nobler embodi- 
ment lives immortal as man himself! It is 
the way with Nature. The genuine essence of 
Truth never dies. That it be genuine, a voice 
from the great Deep of Nature, there is the 
point at Nature's judgment-seat. What we 
call pure or impure, is not with her the final 
question. Not how much chaff is in you; but 
whether you have any wheat. Pure? I 
might say to many a man : Yes, you are pure ; 
pure enough; but you are chaff, — insincere 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 89 

hypothesis, hearsay, formality ; you never were 
in contact with the great heart of the Universe 
at all; you are properly neither pure nor im- 
pure; you are nothing, Nature has no business 
with you. 

Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Chris- 
tianity ; and really, if we look at the wild rapt 
earnestness with which it was believed and 
laid to heart, I should say a better kind than 
that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with 
their vain j anglings about Homoionsion and 
Homoousion, the head full of worthless noise, 
the heart empty and dead! The truth of it is 
embedded in portentious error and falsehood : 
but the truth of it makes it be believed, not 
the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth. A 
bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind ; 
with a heart-life in it ; not dead, chopping bar- 
ren logic merely! Out of all that rubbish of 
Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies, 
traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of 
Greeks and Jews, with their idle wiredrawings, 
this wild man of the Desert, with his wild sin- 
cere heart, earnest as death and life, with his 
great flashing natural eyesight, had seen into 
the kernel of the matter. Idolatry is nothing: 
these Wooden Idols of your, 'ye rub them with 
oil and wax, and the flies stick on them,' — 
these are wood, I tell you ! They can do noth- 
ing for you ; they are an impotent blasphemous 
pretence; a horror and abomination, if ye 
knew them. God alone is; God alone has 
power; He made us, He can kill us and keep 
us alive: * Allah akbar> God is great.' Under- 



90 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

stand that His will is the best for you; that 
howsoever sore to flesh-and-blood, you will find 
it the wisest, best: you are bound to take it 
so ; in this world and in the next, you have no 
other thing that you can do ! 

And now if the wild idolatrous men did be- 
lieve this, and with their fiery hearts lay hold 
of it, to do it, in what form soever it came to 
"them, I say it was well* worthy of being be- 
lieved. In one form or the other, I say it is 
still the one thing worthy of being believed by 
all men. Man does hereby become the high- 
priest of this Temple of a World. He is in 
harmony with the Decrees of the Author of 
this World; co-operating with them, not vainly 
withstanding them: I know, to this day, no 
better definition of Duty than that same. All 
that is right includes itself in this of co-oper- 
ating with the real Tendency of the World; 
you succeed by this (the World's Tendency 
will succeed), you are good, and in the right 
course there. Homoiousion y Homoousion, vain 
logical jangle, then or before or at any itime, 
may jangle itself out, and go whither and how 
it likes; this is the thing it all struggles to 
mean, if it would mean anything. If it do not 
succeed in meaning this, it means nothing. 
Not that Abstractions, logical Propositions, be 
correctly worded or incorrectly; but that liv- 
ing concrete Sons of Adam do lay this to heart : 
that is the important point. Islam devoured 
all these vain jangling Sects; and I think had 
right to do so. It was a Reality, direct from 
the great Heart of Nature once more. Arab 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 91 

idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was 
not equally real had to go up in flame — mere 
dead fuel, in various senses, for this which was 
fire. 

It was during these wild warfarings and 
stragglings, especially after the Flight to 
Mecca, that Mahomet dictated at intervals his 
Sacred Book, which they name Koran, or Read- 
ing, "Thing to be read." This is the Work he 
and his disciples made so much of, asking all 
the world, Is not that a miracle? The Maho- 
metans regard their Koran with a reverence 
which few Christians pay even to their Bible. 
It is admitted everywhere as the standard of 
all law and all practice ; the thing to be gone- 
upon in speculation and life; the message sent 
direct out of Heaven, which this Earth has to 
conform to, and walk by ; the thing to be read. 
Their Judges decide by it; all Moslem are 
bound to study it, seek in it for the light of 
their life. They have mosques where it is all 
read daily; thirty relays of priests take it up 
in succession, get through the whole each day. 
There, for twelve hundred years, has the voice 
of this Book, at all moments, kept sounding 
through the ears and the hearts of so many 
men. We hear of Mahometan Doctors that 
had read it seventy thousand times ! 

Very curious; if one sought for 'discrepan- 
cies of national taste,' here surely were the 
most eminent instance of that! We also can 
read the Koran; our Translation of it, by Sale, 
is known to be a very fair one. I must say, it 



92 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A 
wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; 
endless iterations, long-windedness, entangle- 
ment ; most crude, incondite ; — insupportable 
stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of 
duty could carry any European through the 
Koran. We read in it, as we might in the 
State-paper Office, unreadable masses of lum- 
ber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses 
of a remarkable man. It is true we have it 
under disadvantages; the Arabs see more 
method in it than we. Mahomet's followers 
found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had 
been written-down at first promulgation ; much 
of it, they say, on shoulder-blades of mutton, 
flung pellmell into a chest; and they published 
it, without any discoverable order as to time 
or otherwise; — merely trying, as would seem, 
and this not very strictly, to put the longest 
chapters first. The real beginning of it, in 
that way, lies almost at the end; for the earli- 
est portions were the shortest. Read in its 
historical sequence, it perhaps would not be so 
bad. Much of it, too, they say, is rhythmic ; 
a kind of wild chanting song, in the original. 
This may be a great point; much perhaps has 
been lost in the Translation here. Yet with 
every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how 
any mortal ever could consider this Koran as 
a Book written in Heaven, too good for the 
Earth ; as a well- written book, or, indeed, as a 
book at all ; and not a bewildered rhapsody ; 
written, so far as writing goes, as badly as 
almost any book ever was! So much for 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 93 

national discrepancies, and the standard of 
taste. 

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible 
how the Arabs might so love it. When once 
you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off 
your hands, and have it behind you at a dis- 
tance, the essential type of it begins to disclose 
itself; and in this there is merit quite other 
than the literary one. If a book come from 
the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts ; 
all art and authocraft are of small amount to 
that. One would say the primary character 
of the Koran is this of its genuineness, of its 
being a bona fide book. Prideaux, I know, 
and others have represented it as a mere bun- 
dle of juggleries; chapter after chapter got-up 
to excuse and varnish the author's successive 
sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries; 
but really it is time to dismiss all that. I do 
not assert Mahomet's continual sincerity; who 
is continually sincere? But I confess I can 
make nothing of the critic, in these times, who 
would accuse him of deceit prepense ; of con- 
scious deceit generally, or perhaps at all ; — still 
more, of living in a mere element of conscious 
deceit, and writing this Koran as a forger and 
juggler would have done ! Every candid eye, 
I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than 
so. It is the confused ferment of a great rude 
human soul ; rude, untutored, that cannot even 
read, but fervent,, earnest, struggling vehe- 
mently to utter itself in words. With a kind 
of breathless intensity he strives to utter him- 
self ; the thoughts crowd on him pellmell ; for 



94 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

very multitude of things to say, he can get 
nothing said. The meaning that is in him 
shapes itself into no form of composition, is 
stated in no sequence, method, or coherence; 
— they are not shaped at all, these* thoughts of 
his; flung-out unshaped, as they struggle and 
tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate 
state. We said, "stupid;" yet natural stupid- 
ity is by no means the character of Mahomet's 
Book ; it is natural uncultivation rather. The 
man has not studied speaking; in the haste 
and pressure of continual fighting, has not 
time to mature himself into fit speech. The 
panting breathless haste and vehemence of a 
man struggling in the thick of a battle for life 
and salvation ; this is the mood he is in ! A 
headlong haste; for very magnitude of mean- 
ing, he cannot get himself articulated into 
words. The successive utterances of a soul in 
that mood, colored by the various vicissitudes 
of three-and-twenty years; now well uttered, 
nor worse; this is the Koran. 

For we are to consider Mahomet, through 
these three-and-twenty years, as the center of 
a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the 
Kornish and Heathen, quarrels among his 
own people, backslidings of his own wild heart; 
all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul 
knowing rest no more. In wakeful nights, as 
one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, toss- 
ing amid these vortices, would hail any light 
of a decision for them as a veritable light from 
Heaven ; any making-up of his mind, so bless- 
ed, indispensable for him there, would seem 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 95 

\ 

i the inspiration of a Gabriel. Forger and jug- 
j gler? No, no! This great fiery heart, seeth- 
ing, simmering like a great furnace of thoughts, 
was not a juggler's. His life was a Fact to 
him; this God's Universe an awful Fact and 
. Reality. He has faults enough. The man 
, was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of 
; Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to 
; him ; we must take him for that. But for a 
j wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor 
I without eyes or heart, practicing for a mess of 
; pottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgery 
|/ of celestial documents, continual high-treason 
against his Maker and Self, we will not and 
i cannot take him. 

Sincerity, in all senses seems to me the merit 
; of the Koran ; what had rendered it precious 
: to the wild Arab men. It is, after all, the 
1 first and last merit in a book ; gives rise to 
merits of all kinds, — nay, at bottom, it alone 
; can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously, 
! through these incondite masses of tradition, 
'vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the 
Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we 
i might almost call poetry, is found straggling. 
1 The body of the Book is made-up of mere tra- 
tdition, and as it were vehement enthusiastic 
i extempore preaching. He returns forever to 
i the old stories of the Prophets as they went 
i current in the Arab memory; how Prophet 
rafter Prophet, the Prophet Abraham, the Pro- 
phet Hud, the Prophet Moses, Christian and 
other real and fabulous Prophets, had come to 
this Tribe and to that, warning men of their 



96 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

sin; and been received by them even as he 
Mahomet was, — which is a great solace to him. 
These things he repeats ten, perhaps twenty 
times; again and ever again, with wearisome 
iteration ; has never done repeating them. A 
brave Samuel Johnson, in his forlorn garret, 
might con over the Biographies of Authors in 
that way! This is the great staple of the 
Koran. But curiously, through all this, comes 
ever and anon some glance as of the real think- 
er and seer. He has actually an eye for the 
world, this Mahomet ; with a certain directness 
and rugged vigor, he brings home still, to our 
heart, the thing his own heart has been opened 
to. I make but little of his praises of Allah, 
which many praise; they are borrowed I sup- 
pose mainly from the Hebrew, at least they 
are far surpassed there. But the eye that 
flashes direct into the heart of things, and sees 
the truth of them ; this is to me a highly inter- 
esting object. Great Nature's own gift; which 
she bestows on all ; but which only one in the 
thousand does not cast sorrowfully away ; it is 
what I call sincerity of vision ; the test of a 
sincere heart. 

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often 
answers impatiently; I can work no miracles. 
I? 'I am a Public Teacher;' appointed to 
preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the 
world, as we can see, had really from of old 
been all one great miracle to him. Look over 
the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the 
work of Allah; wholly 'a sign to you,' if your 
eyes were open ! This Earth, God made it for 




Mahomet dictated his sacred book."— Page 91. 



Heroes and Hero Worship. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 97 

you; 'appointed paths in it;' you can live 
in it, go to and fro in it. — The clouds in the 
dry country of Arabia, to Mahomet they are 
very wonderful: Great clouds, he says, born 
in the deep bosom of the Upper Immensity, 
where do thy come from! They hang there, 
the great black monsters; pour down their 
rain-deluges 'to revive a dead earth,' and 
grass springs, and. 'tall leafy palm-trees with 
their date-clusters hanging round. Is not that 
a sign?' Your cattle, too, — Allah made them; 
serviceable dumb creatures; they change the 
grass into milk; you have your clothing from 
them, very strange creatures ; they come rank- 
ing home at evening-time, 'and,' adds he, 
'and are a credit to you!' Ships also, — he 
talks often about ships: Huge moving moun- 
tains, they spread out their cloth wings, go 
bounding through the water there, Heaven's 
wind driving them ; anon they lie motionless, 
God has withdrawn the wind, they lie dead, 
and cannot stir! Miracles? cries he: What 
miracle would you have? Are not you your- 
selves there? God made you, 'shaped you out 
of a little clay. ' Ye were small once ; a few 
years ago ye were not at all. Ye have beauty, 
strength, thoughts, 'ye have compassion on 
one another.' Old age comes on you, and 
gray hairs; your strength fades into feeble- 
ness; ye sink down, and again are not. 'Ye 
have compassion on one another;' this struck 
me much: Allah might have made you having 
no compassion on one another, — how had it 
been then ! This is a great direct thought, a 

7 Heroes 



98 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

glance at first-hand into the very fact of things. 
Rude vestiges of poetic genius, of whatsoever 
is best and truest, are visible in this man. A 
strong untutored intellect; eyesight, heart; a 
strong wild man, — might have shaped himself 
into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero. 

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world 
wholly is miraculous". He sees what, as we 
said once before, all great thinkers, the rude 
Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, 
have contrived to see. That this so solid-look- 
ing material world is, at bottom, in very deed, 
Nothing; is a visual and tactual Manifestation 
of God's power and presence,— a shadow hung- 
out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite ; 
nothing more. The mountains, he says, these 
great rock-mountains, they shall dissipate 
themselves 'like clouds;' melt into the Blue 
as clouds do, and not be! He figures the 
Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an 
immense Plain or firs Plate of ground, the 
mountains are set on that to steady it. At the 
Last Day they shall disappear 'like clouds;' 
the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself 
ofl into wreck, and as dust and vapor vanish in 
the Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it, 
and it ceases to be. The universal empire of 
Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable 
Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be 
named, as the true force, essence and reality, 
in all things whatsoever, was continually clear 
to this man. What a modern talks of by the 
name, Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; and 
does not figure as a divine thing; not even as 



i 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 99 

one thing at all, but as a set of things, undi- 
vine enough, — saleable, curious, good for pro- 
pelling steamships! With our Sciences and 
Cyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the divine- 
ness in those laboratories of ours. We ought 
not to forget it ! That once well forgotten, I 
know not what else were worth remembering. 
Most sciences, I think, were then a very dead 
thing; withered, contentious, empty; — a this- 
tle in late autumn. The best science, without 
this, is but as the dead timber; it is not the 
growing tree and forest, — which gives ever- 
new timber, among other things ! Man cannot 
know either, unless he can worship in some 
way. His knowledge is a pedantry, and dead 
thistle, otherwise. 

Much has been said and written about the 
sensuality of Mahomet's Religion; more than 
was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, 
which he permitted, were not of his appoint- 
ment; he found them practiced, unquestioned 
from immemorial time in Arabia ; what he did 
was to curtail them, restrict them, not on one, 
but on many sides. His Religion is not an 
easy one : with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict 
complex formulas, prayers five times a day, 
and abstinence from wine, it did not 'succeed 
by being an easy religion.' As if, indeed, 
any religion, or cause-holding of religion, 
could succeed by that ! It is a calumny on men 
to say that they are roused to heroic action by 
ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, — sugar- 
plums of any kind, in this world or the next I 
In the meanest mortal there lies something 

fc«ft. 



100 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

nobler. The poor swearing soldier, hired to 
be shot, has his 'honor of a soldier,' different 
from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. 
It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble 
and true things, and vindicate himself under 
God's Heaven as a god-made man, that the poor- 
est son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the 
way of doing that, the dullest daydrudge kin- 
dles into a hero. They wrong man greatly 
who say he is to be seduced oy ease. Diffi- 
culty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the 
allurements that act on the heart of man. 
Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a 
flame that burns-up all lower considerations. 
Not happiness, but something higher: one sees 
this even in the frivolous classes, with their 
'point of honor' and the like. Not by flatter- 
ing our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic 
that slumbers in every heart, can any Religion 
gain followers. 

Mahomet himself, after all that can be sai 
about him, was not a sensual man. We shall 
err widely if we consider this man as a common 
voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, 
— nay, on enjoyments of any kind. His house- 
hold was of the frugalest ; his common diet bar- 
ley-bread and water; sometimes for months 
there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. 
They record with just pride that he would 
mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A 
poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless 
of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, 
I should say; something better in him than 
hunger of any sort, — or these wild Arab men, 



s 

n 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 101 

fighting- and jostling three-and-twenty years at 
his hand, in close contact with him always, 
would not have reverenced him so! They 
were wild men, bursting ever and anon into 
quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity; with- 
out right worth and manhood, no man could 
have commanded them. They called him 
Prophet, you say? Why, he stood there face 
to face with them ; bare, not enshrined in any 
mystery; visibly clouting his own cloak, cob- 
bling his own shoes; fighting, counseling, or- 
dering in the midst of them ; they must have 
seen what kind of a man he was, let him be 
called what you like! No emperor with his 
tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his 
own clouting. During three-and-twenty years 
of rough actual trial. I find something of a 
veritable Hero necessary for that, of itself. 

His last words are a prayer; broken ejacula- 
tions of a heart struggling-tfp, in trembling 
hope, toward its Maker. We cannot say that 
his religion made him worse ; it made him bet- 
ter; good, not bad. Generous things are re- 
corded of him ; when he lost his Daughter, the 
thing he answers is, in his own dialect, every- 
way sincere, and yet equivalent to that of 
Christians, 'The Lord giveth, and the Lord 
taketh away; blessed be the name of the 
Lord.' He answered in like manner of Seid, 
his emancipated well-beloved Slave, the sec- 
ond of the believers. Seid had fallen in the 
War of Tabuc, the first of Mahomet's fightings 
with the Greeks. Mahomet said, It was well ; 
Seid had done his Master's work, Seid had now 



102 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

gone to his Master; it was all well with Seid. 
Yet Seid's daughter found him weeping over 
the body; — the old gray-haired man melting in 
tears! "What do I see?" said she. — "You see 
a friend weeping over his friend. " — He went 
out for the last time into the mosque, two days 
before his death ; asked, If he had injured any 
man? Let his own back fear the stripes. If 
he owed any man? A voice answered, "Yes, 
me three drachms," borrowed on such an occa- 
sion. Mahomet ordered them to be paid: 
"Better be in shame now," said he, "than at 
the Day of Judgment." — You remember Kad- 
ijah, and the "No, by Allah!" Traits of that 
kind show us the genuine man, the brother of 
us all, brought visible through twelve cen- 
turies, — the veritable Son of our common 
Mother. 

Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom 
from cant. He is a rough self-helping son of 
the wilderness; does not pretend to be what 
he is not. There is no ostentatious pride in 
him ; but neither does he go much upon 
humility: he is there as he can be, in cloak and 
shoes of his own clouting; speaks plainly to 
all manner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors, 
what it is they are bound to do; knows well 
enough, about himself, 'the respect due unto 
thee. ' In a life-and-death war with Bedouins, 
cruel things could not fail; but neither are 
acts of mercy, of noble natural pity and gener- 
osity wanting. Mahomet makes no apology 
for the one, no boast of the other. They were 
each the free dictate of his heart; each called- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 103 

Jfor, there and then. Not a mealy-mouthed 
man! A candid ferocity, if the case call for 
it, is in him; he does not mince matters! The 
j war of Tabuc is a thing" he often speaks of: 
, his men refused, many of them, to march on 
that occasion ; pleaded the heat of the weather, 
I the harvest, and so forth ; he can never forget 
that. Your harvest? It lasts for a day. What 
| will become of your harvest through all Eter- 
nity? Hot weather? Yes, it was hot: 'but 
, Hell will be hotter!' Sometimes a rough sar- 
, casm turns-lip : He says to the unbelievers, 
. Ye shall have the just measure of your deeds 
• at that Great Day. They will be weighed- 
out to you; ye shall not have short weight! — 
! Everywhere he fixes the matter in his eye ; he 
sees it: his heart, now and then, is as if struck 
. dumb by the greatness of it. 'Assuredly,' he 
says: that word, in the Koran, is written-down 
sometimes as a sentence by itself: 'Assuredly.' 
No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a busi- 
ness of Reprobation and Salvation with him, 
of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest 
about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, specula- 
tion, a kind of amateur- search for Truth, toy- 
ing and coquetting with Truth : this is the sorest 
sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It 
consists in the heart and soul of the man never 
having been open to Truth; — 'living in a vain 
show.' Such a man not only utters and pro- 
duces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. 
The rational moral principle, spark of the 
Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis 
of life-death. The very falsehoods of Ma- 



104 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

hornet are truer than the truths of such a man. 
He is the insincere man: smooth-polished,, 
respectable in some times and. places; inoffen- 
sive, says nothing harsh to anybody; most 
cleanly, — just as carbonic acid is, which is 
death and poison. 

We will not praise Mahomet's moral pre- 
cepts as always of the superfinest sort; yet it 
can be said that there is always a tendency to 
good in them ; that they are the true dictates 
of a heart aiming toward what is just and true. 
The sublime forgiveness of Christianity, turn- 
ing of the other cheek when the one has been 
smitten, is not here : you are to revenge your- 
self, but it is to be in a measure, not over- 
much, or beyond justice. On the other hand, 
Islam, like any great Faith, and insight into 
the essence of man, is a perfect equalizer of 
men: the soul of one believer outweighs all 
earthly kingships; all men, according to Islam 
too, are equal. Mahomet insists not on the 
propriety of giving alms, but on the necessity 
of it: he marks-down by law how much you 
are to give, and it is at your peril if you 
neglect. The tenth part of a man's annual 
income, whatever that may be, is the property 
of the poor, of those that are afflicted and need 
help. Good all this: the natural voice of 
humanity, of pity and equity dwelling in the 
heart of this wild Son of Nature speaks so. 

Mahomet's Paradise is sensual, his Hell 
sensual: true; in the one and the other there 
is enough that shocks all spiritual feeling in 
us. But we are to recollect that the Arabs 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 105 

,i already had it so; that Mahomet, in whatever 
he changed of it, softened and diminished all 
this. The worst sensualities, too, are the work 
of doctors, followers of his, not his work. In 
the Koran there is really very little said about 
the joys of Paradise ; they are intimated rather 
than insisted on. Nor is it forgotten that the 
highest joys even there shall be spiritual: the 
pure Presence of the Highest, this shall infin- 
itely transcend all other joys. He says, 'Your 
salutation shall be, Peace. ' Salam, Have 
Peace ! — the thing that all rational souls long 
for, and seek, vainly here below, as the one 
.blessing. 4 Ye shall sit on seats, facing one 
another: all grudges shall be taken away out 
of your hearts. ' All grudges ! Ye shall love 
oone another freely; for each of you, in the 
eyes of his brothers, there will be Heaven 
enough! 

In reference to this of the sensual Paradise 

5 and Mahomet's sensuality, the sorest chapter 

of all for us, there were many things to be 

i said ; which it is not convenient to enter upon 

here. Two remarks only I shall make, and 

1^ therewith leave it to your candor. The first is 

(furnished me by Goethe; it is a casual hint of 

!his which seems well worth taking note of. 

'I In one of his Delineations, in Meister's Travels 

iit is, the hero comes upon a Society of men 

i with very strange ways, one of which was 

Itthis: " We require," says the Master, "that each 

;:of our people shall restrict himself in one 

direction," shall go right against his desire in 

ione matter, and make himself do the thing he 

8 Heroes 



106 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

does not wish, "should we allow him the 
greater latitude on all other sides." There 
seems to me a great justness in this. Enjoying 
things which are pleasant ; that is not the evil : 
it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery 
by them that is. Let a man assert withal 
that he is king over his habitudes; that he 
could and would shake them off, on cause 
shown: this is an excellent law. The Month 
Ramadhan for the Moslem, much in Mahomet's 
Religion, much in his own Life, bears in that 
direction ; if not by forethought, or clear pur- 
pose of moral improvement on his part, then 
by a certain healthy manful instinct, which is 
as good. 

But there is another thing to be said about 
the Mahometan Heaven and Hell. This 
namely, that, however gross and material 
they may be, they are an emblem of an ever- 
lasting truth, not always so well remembered 
elsewhere. That gross sensual Paradise of his; 
that horrible flaming Hell; the great enor- 
mous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists 
on : what is all this but a rude shadow, in the 
rude Bedouin imagination, of that grand spirit- 
ual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, which it is 
ill for us too if we do not all know and feel : 
the Infinite Nature of Duty? That man's 
actions here are of infinite moment to him, 
and never die or end at all ; that man, with 
his little life, reaches upward high as Heaven, 
downward low as Hell, and in his threescore 
years of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and 
wonderfully hidden : all this had burnt itself, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 107 

as in flame characters, into the wild Arab 
soul. As in flame and lightning, it stands 
written there; awful, unspeakable, ever present 
to him. With bursting earnestness, with a 
fierce savage sincerity, halt, articulating, not 
able to articulate, he strives to speak it, bodies 
it forth in that Heaven and that Hell. Bodied 
forth in what way you will, it is the first of all 
truths. It is venerable under all embodi- 
ments. What is the chief end of man here 
below? Mahomet has answered this question, 
in a way that might put some of us to shame I 
He does not, like a Bentham, a Pale3^, take 
Right and Wrong, and calculate the profit and 
loss, ultimate pleasure of the one and of the 
other; and summing all up by addition and 
subtraction into a net result, ask you, Whether 
on the whole the Right does not preponderate 
^considerably? No; it is not better to do the 
one than the other; the one is to the other as 
life is to death, — as Heaven is to Hell. The 
one must in nowise be done, the other in no- 
wise left undone. You shall not measure 
them; they are incommensurable: the one is 
death eternal to man, the other is life eternal. 
Benthamee Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; 
reducing this God's-world to a dead brute 
Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of 
Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay 
and thistles on, pleasures and pains on: — If 
you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, the 
beggarlier and faster view of Man and his Des- 
tinies in this Universe, I will answer, it is not 
Mahomet ! 



108 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

On the whole, we will repeat that this Relig- 
ion of Mahomet's is a kind of Christianity; has 
a genuine element of what is spiritually 
highest looking through it, not to be hidden 
by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian 
God Wish, the god of all rude men, — this has 
been enlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; 
but a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and 
to be earned by faith and well-doing, »by 
valiant action, and a divine patience which is 
still more valiant. It is Scandinavian Pagan- 
ism, and a truly celestial element superadded 
to that. Call it not false; look not at the false- 
hood of it, look at the truth of it. For these 
twelve centuries, it has been the religion and 
life-guidance of the fifth part of the whole 
kindred of Mankind. Above all things, it has 
been a religion heartily believed. These 
Arabs believe their religion, and try to live 
by it ! No Christians, since the early ages, or 
only perhaps the English Puritans in modern 
times, have ever stood by their Faith as the 
Moslem do by theirs, — believing it wholly, 
fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it. 
This night the watchman on the streets of 
Cairo when he cries, "Who goes?" will hear 
from the passenger, along with his answer, 
"There is no God but God." Allah akbar, 
Islam, sounds through the souls, and whole 
daily existence, of these dusky millions. Zeal- 
ous missionaries preach it abroad among 
Malays, black Papuans, brutal Idolaters; — dis- 
placing what is worse, nothing that is better or 
good. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 109 

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from 
darkness into light; Arabia first became alive 
by means of it. A poor shepherd people, 
roaming unnoticed in its desert since the cre- 
ation of the world: a Hero- prophet was sent 
down to them with a world they could believe : 
see, the unnoticed becomes world notable, 
the small has grown world-great; within one 
century afterward, Arabia is at Grenada on 
this hand, at Delhi on that; — glancing in valor 
and splendor and the light of genius, Arabia 
shines through long ages over a great section 
of the world. Belief is great, live-giving. 
The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul- 
elevating, great, so soon as it believes. These 
Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one cen- 
tury, — is it not as if a spark had fallen, one 
spark, on a world of what seemed black un- 
noticeable sand ; but lo, the sand proves explo- 
sive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to 
Grenada! I said, the Great Man was always 
as lightning out of Heaven ; the rest of men 
waited for him like fuel, and then they too 
would flame. 



110 LECTURES ON HEROES. 



LECTURE III. 

THE HERO AS POET. DANTE: SHAKESPEARE. 

[Tuesday, 12th May, 1840.] 

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, 
are productions of old ages; not to be repeated 
in the new. They presuppose a certain rude- 
ness of conception, which the progress of mere 
scientific knowledge puts an end to. There 
needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or 
almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in 
their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow- 
man either a god or one speaking with the 
voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are 
past. We are now to see our Hero in the less 
ambitious, but also less questionable, charac- 
ter of Poet ; a character which does not pass. 
The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all 
ages; whom all ages possess, when once he 
is produced, whom the newest age as the 
oldest may produce ; — and will produce, always 
when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a 
Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible 
that he may be shaped into a Poet. 

Hero, Prophet, Poet, — many different 
names,in different times and places, do we 
give to Great Men ; according to varieties we 
note in them, according to the sphere in 









LECTURES ON HEROES. Ill 

which they have displayed themselves! We 
might give many more names, on this same 
principle. I will remark again, however, as 
a fact not unimportant to be understood, that 
the different sphere constitutes the grand 
origin of such distinction; that the Hero can 
be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest, or what you 
will, according to the kind of world he finds 
himself born into. I confess, I have no notion 
of a truly great man that could not be all 
sorts of men. The Poet who could merely sit 
on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never 
make a stanza worth much. He could not 
sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself 
were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy 
there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, 
Legislator, Philosopher; — in one or the other 
degree, he could have been, he is all these. So 
too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with 
that great glowing heart, with the fire that 
was in it, with the bursting tears that were in 
it, could not have written verses, tragedies, 
poems and touched all hearts in that way, had 
his course of life and education led him thith- 
erward. The grand fundamental character is 
that of Great Man; that the man be great. 
Napoleon has words in him which are like 
Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Mar- 
shals are a kind of poetical men withal; the 
things Turenne sa} r s are full of sagacity and 
geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. 
The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: 
there it lies; no man whatever, in what prov- 
ince soever, can prosper at all without these. 



112 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic mes- 
sages, it seems, quite well: one can easily 
believe ft; they had done things a little harder 
than these! Burns, a gifted song- writer, 
might have made a still better Mirabeau. 
Shakespeare, — one knows not what he could not 
have made, in the supreme degree. 

True, there are aptitudes of nature too. 
Nature does not make all great men, more 
than all other men, in the self-same mould. 
Varieties of aptitude doubtless; but infinitely 
more of circumstance; and far oftenest it is 
the latter only that are looked to. But it is as 
with common men in the learning of trades. 
You take any man, as yet a vague capability 
of a man, who could be any kind of craftsman ; 
and make him into a smith, a carpenter, a 
mason : he is then and thenceforth that and 
nothing else. And if, as Addison complains, 
you sometimes see a street-porter staggering 
under his load of spindleshanks, and near at 
hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson 
handling a bit of cloth and small Whitechapel 
needle, — it cannot be considered that aptitude 
of Nature alone has been consulted here 
either! — The Great Man also, to what shall he 
be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he 
to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher, 
Poet? It is an inexplicably complex contro- 
versial-calculation between the world and him! 
He will read the world and its laws; the world 
with its laws will be there to be read. What 
the world, on this matter, shall permit and bid 



a—. __ aamm 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 113 

is, as we said, the most important fact about 
the world. — 

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose 
modern notions of them. In some old lan- 
guages, again, the titles are synonymous; 
Vates means both Prophet and Poet: and in- 
deed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well 
understood, have much kindred of meaning. 
Fundamentally indeed they are still the same ; 
in this most important respect especially, 
That they have penetrated both of them into 
the sacred mystery of the Universe; what 
Goethe calls 'the open secret.' "Which is the 
great secret?" asks one. — "The open secret," 
— open to all, seen by almost none! That 
divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all 
Beings, 'the Divine Idea of the World, that 
which lies at the bottom of Appearance, ' as 
Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, 
from the starry sky to the grass of the field, 
but especially the Appearance of Man and his 
work, is but the vesture, the embodiment that 
renders it visible. This divine mystery is in 
all times and in all places ; veritably is. In 
most times and places it is greatly overlooked ; 
and the Universe, definable always in one or 
the other dialect, as the realized Thought of 
God, is considered a trivial, inert, common- 
place matter, — as if, says the Satirist, it were 
a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put 
together! It could do no good, at present, to 
speak much about this; but it, is a pity for 
every one of us if we do not know it, live ever 
in the knowledge of it. Really a most mourn- 



114 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

fulpity; — a failure to live at all, if we live 
otherwise! 

But now, I say, whoever may forget this 
divine mystery, the Vates, whether Prophet 
or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent 
hither to make it more impressively known 
to us. That always is his message; he is to 
reveal that to us, — that sacred mystery which 
he more than others lives ever present with. 
While others forget it, he knows it; — I might 
say, he has been driven to know it ; without 
consent asked of him, he finds himself living 
in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is 
no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; 
this man too could not help being a sincere 
man! Whosoever may live in the shows of 
things, it is for him a necessity of nature to 
live in the very fact of things. A man once 
more, in earnest with the Universe, though all 
others were but toying with it. He is a Vates, 
first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far 
Poet and Prophet, participators in the 'open 
secret,' are one. 

With respect to their distinction again: The 
Vates Prophet, we might say, has seized that 
sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as 
Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition ; the Vates 
Poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic 
side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we 
may call a revealer of what we are to do, the 
other of what we are to love. But indeed 
these two provinces run into one another, and 
cannot be disjoined. The Prophet too has his 
eye on what we are to love: how else shall he 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 115 

know what it is we are to do? The highest 
Voice ever heard on this earth said withal, 
"Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, 
neither do they spin; yet Solomon in all his 
glory was not arrayed like one of these." A 
glance, that, into the deepest deep of Beauty. 
'The lilies of the field,' — dressed finer than 
earthly princes, springing-up there in the 
humble furrow-field; a beautiful eye looking- 
out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! 
How could the rude Earth make these, if her 
Essence, rugged as she looks and is, were not 
inwardly Beauty? In this point of view, too, 
a saying of Goethe's, which has staggered sev- 
eral, may have meaning: 'The Beautiful,' he 
intimates, 'is higher than the Good, the Beau- 
tiful includes in it 'the Good.' The true 
Beautiful; which however, I have said some- 
where, 'differs from the false as Heaven does 
from Vauxhall!' So much for the distinction 
and identity of Poet and Prophet. — 

In ancient and also in modern periods wc 
find a few Poets who are accounted perfect; 
whom it were a kind of treason to find fault 
with. This is noteworthy; this is right: yet 
in strictness it is only an illusion. At bottom, 
clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A 
vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men ; 
no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are 
all poets when we read a poem well. The 
'imagination that shudders at the Hell of 
Dante,' is not that the same faculty, weaker in 
degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakes- 
peare can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus^ 



116 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

the story of Hamlet as Shakespeare did : but 
every one models some kind of stor)' out of it ; 
every one embodies it better or worse. We 
need not spend time in defining. Where there 
is no specific difference, as between round and 
square, all definition must be more or less arbi- 
trary. A man that has so much more of the 
poetic element developed in him as to have 
become noticeable, will be called Poet by his 
neighbors. World-Poets too, those whom we 
are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by 
critics in the same way. One who rises so far 
above the general level of Poets will, to such 
and such critics, seem a Universal Poet ; as he 
ought to do. And yet it is, and must be, an 
arbitrary distinction. All Poets, all men, have 
some touches of the Universal; no man is 
wholly made of that. Most Poets are very soon 
forgotten ; but not the noblest Shakespeare or 
Homer of them can be remembered forever; 
— a day comes when he too is not! 

Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a 
difference between true Poetry and true Speech 
not poetical: what is the difference? On this 
point many things have been written, espe- 
cially by late German Critics, some of which 
are not very intelligible at first. They say, 
for example, that the Poet has an infinitude 
in him ; communicates an Unendlichkeit, a cer- 
tain character of 'infinitude,' to whatsoever he 
delineates. This, though not very precise, 
yet on so vague a matter is worth remember- 
ing: if well meditated, some meaning will 
gradually be found in it. For my own part, I 






■■■■■HHiHaHHHHi 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 117 

find considerable meaning in the old vulgar 
distinction of Poetry being metrical, having 
music in it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed 
to give a definition, one might say this as soon 
as anything else: If your delineation be au- 
thentically musical, musical not in word only, 
but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts 
and utterances of it, in the whole conception 
of it, then it will be poetical; if not, not. — 
Musical: how much, lies in that! A musical 
thought is one spoken by a mind that has pen- 
etrated into the inmost heart of the thing; 
detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the 
melody that lies hidden in it; the inward 
harmony Of coherence which is its soul, 
whereby it exists, and has a right to be here 
in this world. All inmost things, we may say, 
are melodious ; naturally utter themselves in 
Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who 
is there that, in logical words, can express the 
effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate 
unfathomable speech, which leads us to the 
ledge of the Infinite and lets us for moments 
gaze into that! 

Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, 
has something of song in it: not a parish in the 
world but has its parish-accent; — the rhythm 
or tune to which the people there sing what 
they have to say! Accent is a kind of chant- 
ing; all men have accent of their own, — though 
they only notice that of others. Observe too 
how all passionate language does of itself 
become musical, — with a finer music than the 
mere accent; the speech of a man even in zeal- 



118 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

otis anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep 
things are Song. It seems someho.w the very 
central essence of us, Song; as if the rest 
were but wrappages and hulls! The primal 
element of us; of us, and of all things. The 
Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was 
the feeling they had of the inner structure of 
Nature; that the soul of all her voices and 
utterances was perfect music. Poetry, there- 
fore, we will call musical thought. The Poet 
is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom, 
it turns still on power of intellect; it is a 
man's sincerity and depth of vision that 
makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you 
see musically ; the heart of Nature being every- 
where music, if you can only reach it. 

The Vates Poet, with his melodious Apoca- 
lypse of Nature, seems to hold a poor rank 
among us, in comparison with the Vates Prop- 
het; his function, and our esteem of him for 
his function, alike slight. The Hero taken as 
Divinity ; the Hero taken as Prophet ; then 
next the Hero taken only as Poet: does it not 
look as if our estimate of the Great Man, 
epoch after epoch, were continually diminish- 
ing? We take him first for a god, then for one 
god-inspired; and now in the next stage of it, 
,his most miraculous word gains from us only 
the recognition that he is a Poet, beautiful 
verse-maker, man of genius, or suchlike! — It 
looks so; but I persuade myself that intrinsic- 
ally it is not so. If we consider well, it will 
perhaps appear that in man still there is the 
same altogether peculiar admiration for the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 119 



Heroic Gift, by what name soever called, that 
t there at any time was. 

If should say, if we do not now. reckon a 
( Great Man literally divine, it is that our no- 
tions of God, of the supreme unattainable 
! Fountain of Splendor, Wisdom and Heroism, 
,are ever rising higher; not altogether that our 
reverence for these qualities, as manifested in 
'our like, is getting lower. This is worth taking 
thought of. Sceptical Dilettantism, the curse 
of these ages, a curse which will not last for- 
ever, does indeed in this the highest province 
of human things, as in all provinces, make sad 
work; and our reverence for great men, all 
crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out 
iin poor plight, hardly recognizable. Men 
worship the shows of great men ; the most dis- 
believe that there is any reality of great men 
to worship. The dreariest, fatalest faith ; be- 
lieving which, one would literally despair of 
human things. Nevertheless, look, for ex- 
ample, at Napoleon! A Corsican lieutenant of 
artillery; that is the show of him: yet is he 
:not obeyed, worshiped after his sort, as all the 
Tiaraed and Diademed of the world put to- 
gether could not b'e? High Duchesses, and 
i ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rus- 
tic, Burns; — a strange feeling dwelling in each 
that they never heard a man like this; that, on 
the whole, this is the man ! In the secret 
heart of these people it still dimly reveals itself, 
though there is no accredited way of uttering 
it at present, that this rustic, with his black 
brows and flashing sun-eyes, and strange words 



120 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity far 
beyond all others, immeasurable with all 
others. Do not we feel it so? But now, were 
Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all 
that sorrowful brood, cast-out of us, — as, by 
God's blessing, they shall one day be; were 
faith in the shows of things entirely swept- 
out, replaced by clear faith in the things, so 
that a man acted on the impulse of that only, 
and counted the other non-extant ; what a new 
livelier feeling toward this Burns were it ! 

Nay here in these ages, such as they are, 
have we not two mere Poets, if not deified, yet 
may say beatified? Shakespeare and Dante are 
Saints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, 
canonized, so that it is impiety to meddle with 
them. The unguided instinct of the world, 
working across all these perverse impediments, 
has arrived at such result. Dante and Shakes- 
peare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, 
in a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none 
second to them : in the general feeling of the 
world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as 
of complete perfection, invests these two. 
They are canonized, though no Pope or Cardi- 
nals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of 
every perverting influence, in the most unhe- 
roic times, is still our indestructible reverence 
for heroism. — We will look a little at these Two, 
the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakespeare: 
what little it is permitted us to say here of the 
Hero as Poet will most fitly arrange itself in 
that fashion.. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 121 

Many volumes Have been written by way of 
commentary on Dante and his Book; yet, on 
the whole, with no great result. His Biog- 
raphy is, as it were, irrecoverably lost for 
us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow- 
stricken man, not much note was taken of him 
while he lived; and the most of that has van- 
ished, in the long space that now intervenes. 
It is five centuries since he ceased writing and 
living here. After all commentaries, the Book 
itself is mainly what we know of him. The 
Book ; and one might add that Portrait com- 
monly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on 
it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, 
whoever did it. To me it is a most touching 
face. Perhaps of all faces that I know, the 
most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, 
with the simple laurel wound round it ; the 
deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory 
which is also deathless; — significant of the 
whole history of Dante! I think it is the 
mournfulest face that ever was painted from 
reality; an altogether tragic heart-affecting 
face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the 
softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a 
child ; but all this is as if congealed into sharp 
contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, 
proud, hopeless pain. A soft ethereal soul 
looking-out so stern, implacable, grim-trench- 
ant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice ! 
Withal it is a silent pain too, a silent scornful 
one : the lip is curled in a kind of godlike dis- 
dain of the thing that is eating-out his heart, 
— as if it were withal a mean, insignificant 



122 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

thing, as if he whom it had power to torture 
and strangle were greater than it. The face 
of one wholly in protest, and life-long unsur- 
rendering battle, against the world. Affection 
all converted into indignation : an implacable 
indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that of 
a god! The eye, too, it looks-out — in a kind 
of surprise, a kind of inquiry, Why the world 
was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he 
looks, this 'voice of ten silent centuries,' and 
sings us 'his mystic unfathomable song. ' 

The little that we know of Dante's Life cor- 
responds well enough with this Portrait and 
this Book. He was born at Florence, in the 
upper class of society, in the year 1265. His 
education was the best then going; much 
school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin 
classics, — no inconsiderable insight into cer- 
tain provinces of things: and Dante, with his 
earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt, 
learned better than most all that was learn- 
able. He has a clear cultivated understanding, 
and of great subtlety; this best fruit of educa- 
tion he had contrived to realize from these 
scholastics. He knows accurately and well 
what lies close to him; but, in such a time, 
without printed books or free intercourse, he 
could not know well what was distant: the 
small clear light, most luminous for what is 
near, breaks itself into singular chiaroscuro 
striking on what is far off. This was Dante's 
learning from the schools. In life, he had 
gone through the usual destinies; been twice 
out campaigning as a soldier for the Floren- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 123 

, tine State ; been on embassy ; had in his thirty- 
fifth year, by natural gradation of talent and 
, service, become one of the Chief Magistrates 
, of Florence. He had met in boyhood a cer- 
tain Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl 
of his own age and rank, and grown-up thence- 
forth in partial sight of her, in some distant in- 
tercourse with her. All readers know his 
graceful affecting account of this; and then of 
their being parted; of her being wedded to 
another, and of her death soon after. She 
makes a great figure in Dante's Poem; seems 
to have made a great figure in his life. Of all 
beings it might seem as if she, held apart from 
him, far apart at last in the dim Eternity, 
were the only one he had ever with his whole 
strength of affection loved. She died : Dante 
himself was wedded ; but it seems not happily, 
far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous earn- 
est man, with his keen excitabilities, was not 
altogether easy to make happy. 

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: 
had all gone right with him as he wished it, he 
might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever 
they call it, of Florence, well accepted among 
neighbors, — and the world had wanted one of 
the most notable words ever spoken or sung. 
Florence would have had another prosperous 
Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries con- 
tinued voiceless, and the ten other listening- 
centuries (for there will be ten of them and 
more) had no Divinia Commedia to hear! We 
will complain of nothing. A noble destiny 
was appointed for this Dante ; and he, strug- 



124 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

gling like a man led toward death and cruci- 
fixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give him 
the choice of his happiness! He knew not, 
more than we do, what was really happy, what 
was really miserable. 

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, 
Bianchi-Neri, or some other confused disturb- 
ances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose 
party had seemed the stronger, was with his 
friends cast unexpectedly forth into banish- 
ment ; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and 
wandering. His property was all confiscated 
and more; he had the fiercest feeling that it 
was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of 
God and man. He tried what was in him to 
get reinstated ; tried even by warlike surprisal, 
with arms in his hand : but it would not do ; 
bad only had become worse. There is a 
record, I believe, still extant in the Florence 
Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever 
caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive ; so it 
stands, they say: a very curious civic docu- 
ment. Another curious document, some con- 
siderable number of years later, is a Letter of 
Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates, writ- 
ten in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, 
that he should return on condition of apologiz- 
ing and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed 
stern pride: "If I cannot return without call- 
ing myself guilty, I will never return nunquam 
revertar. ' ' 

For Dante there was now no home in this 
world. He wandered from patron to patron, 
from place to place ; proving, in his own bitter 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 125 

words, 'How hard is the path, Come e duro 
called The wretched are not cheerful com- 
pany. Dante,, poor and banished, with his 
proud earnest nature, with his moody humors, 
was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch 
reports of him that being at Can della Scala's 
court, and blamed one day for his gloom and 
taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like 
way. Delia Scala stood among his courtiers, 
with mimes and buffoons {nebulones ac histri- 
ones) making him heartily merry; when turn- 
ing to Dante, he said: "Is it not strange, now, 
that this poor fool should make himself so en- 
tertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there 
day after day, and have nothing to amuse us 
with at all?" Dante answered bitterly: "No, 
not strange ; your Highness is to recollect the 
Proverb, Like to Like;" — given the amuser, 
the amusee must also be given ! Such a man, 
with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms 
and sorrows, was not made to succeed at court. 
By degrees, it came to be evident to him that 
he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of 
benefit, in this earth. The earthly world. had 
cast him forth, to wander, wander; no living 
heart to love him now ; for his sore miseries 
there was no solace here. 

The deeper naturally would the Eternal 
World impress itself on him ; that awful reality 
over which, after all, this Time-world, with its 
Florences and banishments, only flutters as 
an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt never 
see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou 
shalt surely see ! What is Florence, Can della 



126 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Scala and the World and Life altogether? 
Eternity: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, 
art thou and all things bound ! The great soul 
of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home 
more and more in that awful other world. 
Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, as on 
the one fact important for him. Bodied or bod- 
iless, it is the one fact important for all 
men : — but to Dante, in that age, it was bodied 
in fixed certainty of scientific shape ; he no more 
doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay 
there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, 
and that he himself should see it, than we doubt 
that we should see Constantinople if we went 
thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, 
brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, 
bursts forth at length into 'mystic unfathom- 
able song;' and this his Divine Comedy, the 
most remarkable of all modern Books, is the 
result. 

It must have been a great solacement to 
Dante, and was, as we can see, a proud 
thought for him at times, That he, here in ex- 
ile, could do this work; that no Florence, nor 
no man or men, could hinder him from doing 
it, or even much help him in doing it. He 
knew too, partly, that it was great ; the great- 
est a man could do. 'If thou follow thy star, 
Se tn segiii tua stella,' — so could the Hero, in. 
his forsakedness, in his extreme need, still say 
to himself: "Follow thou thy star, thou shalt 
not fail of a glorious haven!" The labor of 
writing, we find, and indeed could know other- 
wise, was great and painful for him; he says, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 127 

This Book, 'which has made me lean for many- 
years. * Ah yes, it was won, all of it, with 
pain and sore toil, — not in sport, but in grim 
earnest. His Book, as indeed most good 
Books are, has been written, in many senses, 
with his heart's blood. It is his whole his- 
tory, this Book. He died after finishing it; 
not yet very old, at the age of fifty-six; — 
broken-hearted, rather, as is said. He lies 
buried in his death-city Ravenna; Hie claudor 
Da?itespatriis extorris ab oris. The Florentines 
begged back his body, in a century after; the 
Ravenna people would not give it. "Here am 
I Dante laid, shut-out from my nature shores. " 

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is 
Tieck who calls it 'a mystic unfathomable 
Song;' and such is literally the character of it. 

Coleridge remarks very pertinently some- 
where, that wherever you find a sentence 
musically worded, of true rhythm and melody 
in the words, there is something deep and good 
rin the meaning too. For body and soul, word 
and idea, go strangely together here as every- 
' where. Song: we said before, it was the 
Heroic of Speech! All old Poems, Homer's 
;and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would 
<say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; 
(that whatsoever is not sung is properly no 
Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jing- 
iling lines, — to the great injury of the grammar, 
!to the great grief of the reader, for most part! 
'What we want to get at is the thought the man 
■ had, if he had any; why should he twist it into 
jingle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is 



128 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

only when the heart of him is rapt into true 
passion of melody, and the very tones of him, 
according to Coleridge's remark, become musi- 
cal by the greatness, depth and music of his 
thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme 
and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen 
to him as the Heroic of Speakers, — whose 
speech is Song. Pretenders to this are many ; 
and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for most 
part a very melancholy, not to say an insup- 
portable business, that of reading rhyme! 
Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be 
rhymed: — it ought to have been told us 
plainly, without any jingle, what it was aim- 
ing at. I would advise all men who can speak 
their thought, not to sing it; to understand 
that, in a serious time, among serious men, 
there is no vocation in them for singing it. 
Precisely as we love the true song, and are 
charmed by it as by something divine, so shall 
we hate the false song, and account it a mere 
wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, 
altogether an insincere and offensive thing. 

I give Dante my highest praise when I say 
of his Divine Comedy that it is, in all senses, 
genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it 
there is a canto fermo; it proceeds as by a 
chant. The language, his simple terzarima^ 
doubtless helped him in this. One reads 
along naturally with a sort of lilt. But I add, 
that it could not be otherwise; for the essence 
and material of the work are themselves rhyth- 
mic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sin. 
cerity, makes it musical; — go deep enough, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 129 

there is music everywhere. A true inward 
symmetry, what one calls an architectural har- 
mony, reigns in it, proportionates it all: archi- 
tectural : which also partakes of the character 
of music. The three kingdoms, Inferno, Pur- 
\ gatorio, Paradiso, look-out on one another like 
% compartments of a great edifice; a great super- 
natural world-cathedral, piled-up there, stern, 
solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It 
is, at bottom, the sincerest of all Poems; sin- 
cerity, here too, we find to be the measure of 
worth. It came deep out of the author's heart 
of hearts ; and it goes deep, and through long 
generations, into ours. The people of Ver- 
ona, when they saw him on the streets, used 
to say, "Eccovi /' uom cti e stato air Inferno, 
See, there is the man that was in Hell!" Ah 
yes, he had been in Hell: — in Hell enough, in 
long severe sorrow and struggle as the like 
of him is pretty sure to have been. Com- 
medias that come-out divine are not accom- 
plished otherwise. Thought, true labor of any 
kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the 
daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black 
whirlwind ; — true effort, in fact, as of a captive 
struggling to free himself: that is Thought. 
In all ways we are 'to become perfect through 
suffering.' — But, as I say, no work known to 
me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has 
all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of 
the soul. It had made him 'lean' for many 
years. Not the general whole only ; every com- 
partment of it is worked out, with intense 
earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. 

9 Heroes 



130 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Each answers to the other; each fits in its 
place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and 
polished. It is the soul of Dante, and in this 
the soul of the middle ages, rendered forever 
rhythmically visible there. No light task; a 
right intense one : but a task which is done. 

Perhaps one would say, intensity, with the 
much that depends on it, is the prevailing 
character of Dante's genius. Dante does not 
come before us as a large catholic mind; but 
rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: 
it is partly the fruit of his age and position, 
but partly too of his own nature. His great- 
ness has, in all senses, concentered itself into 
fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great 
not because he is world-wide, but because he is 
world-deep. Through all objects he pierces 
as it were down into the heart of Being. I 
know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, 
for example, to begin with the outermost de- 
velopment of his intensity, consider how he 
paints. He has a great power of vision; seizes 
the very type of a thing; presents that and 
nothing more. You remember that first view 
he gets of the Hall of Dite: red pinnacle, red- 
hot cone of iron glowing through the dim im- 
mensity of gloom; — so vivid, so distinct, vis- 
ible at once and forever! It is as an emblem 
of the whole genius of Dante. There is a 
brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus 
is not briefer, more condensed; and then in 
Dante it seems a natural condensation, spon- 
taneous to the man. One smiting word; and 
then there is silence, nothing more said. His 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 131 

silence is more eloquent than words. It is 
strange with what a sharp decisive grace he 
snatches the true likeness of a matter: cuts in- 
to the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, 
the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's re- 
buke; it is 'as the sails sink, the mast being 
suddenly broken.' Or that poor Brunetto 
Latini, with the cotto aspetto, 'face baked,' 
parched brown and lean; and the 'fiery snow' 
that falls on them there, a 'fiery snow without 
wind, ' slow, deliberate, never-ending ! Or the 
lids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, 
in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its 
Soul in torment ; the lids laid open there ; they 
are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, 
through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; 
and how Cavalcante falls — at hearing of his 
Son, and the past tense k fue > ! The very move- 
ments in Dante have something brief; swift, 
decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost 
essence of his genius this sort of painting. 
The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so 
silent passionate, with its quick abrupt move- 
ments, its silent 'pale rages,' speaks itself in 
these things. 

For though this of painting is one of the 
outermost developments of a man, it comes 
like all else from the essential faculty of him ; 
it is physiognomical of the whole man. Find; 
a man whose words paint you a likeness, you 
have found a man worth something; mark 
his manner of doing it, as very characteristic 
of him. In the first place, he could not have 
discerned the object at all, or seen the vital 



132 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

type of it, unless he had, what we may call, 
sympathized with it, — had sympathy in him 
to bestow on objects. He must have been sin- 
cere about it too ; sincere and sympathetic: a 
man without worth cannot give 3^ou the like- 
ness of any object ; he dwells in vague out- 
wardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about 
all objects. And indeed may we not say that 
intellect altogether expresses itself in this 
power of discerning what an object is? What- 
soever of faculty a man's mind may have will 
come out here. Is it even of business, a matter 
to be done? The gifted man is he who sees 
the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside 
as surplusage ; it is his faculty too, the man of 
business's faculty, that he discern the true 
likeness, not the false superficial one, of the 
thing he has got to work in. And how much 
of morality is in the kind of insight we get of 
anything: 'the eye seeing in all things what it 
'brought with it the faculty of seeing' ! To the 
mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as 
to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, 
the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait- 
painters withal. No most gifted eye can ex- 
haust the significance of any object. In the 
commonest human face there lies more than 
Raphael will take away with him. 

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, 
true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark 
night; taken on the wider scale, it is every 
way noble, and the outcome of a great soul. 
Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in 
that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a 



i 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 133 

ground of eternal black. A small flute-voice 
of infinite wail speaks there, into our very- 
heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it 
too: della bella persona, die mi fu tolta; and how, 
even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that he 
will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in 
these alii gnai. And the racking winds, in 
that aer bmno, whirl them away again, to wail 
forever! — Strange to think: Dante was the 
friend of this poor Francesca's father; Fran- 
cesca herself might have sat upon the Poet's 
knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite 
pity, yet also infinite rigor of law: it is so 
Nature is made ; it is so Dante discerned that 
she was made. What a paltry notion is that 
of his Divine Comedy's being a poor splenetic 
impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into 
Hell whom he could not be avenged-upon on 
earth ! I suppose if every pity, tender as a 
mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was 
in Dante's. But a man who does not know 
rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be 
cowardly, egotistic, — sentimentality, or little 
better. I know not in the world an affection 
equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a 
trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail 
of ^Eolean harps, soft, soft; like a child's 
young heart; — and then that stern, sore-sad- 
dened heart! These longings of his toward 
his Beatrice; their meeting together in the 
Paradiso; his gazing in her pure transfigured 
eyes, her that had been purified by death so 
long, separated from him so far: — one likens 
it to the song of angels; it is among the purest 



134 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

utterances of affection, perhaps the very pur- 
est, that ever came out of a human soul. 

For the intense Dante is intense in all 
things ; he has got into the essence of all. His 
intellectual insight as Painter, on occasion too 
as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts 
of intensity. Morally great, above all, we 
must call him ; it is the beginning of all. His 
scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his 
love ; — as indeed, what are they but \he inverse 
or converse of his love? • A Dio spiacenti ed a! 
nemici sni, Hateful to God and to the enemies 
of God:' lofty scorn, unappeasable silent repro- 
bation and aversion ; l Non ragio?iam di lor, We 
will not speak of them, look only and pass. ' 
Or think of this: 'They have not the hope to 
die, Non han speranza di morte. * One day, it 
had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart 
of Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, 
worn as he was, would full surely die; 'that 
Destiny itself could not doom him not to die. ' 
Such words are in this man. For rigor, earn- 
estness and depth, he is not to be paralleled 
in the modern world; to seek his parallel we 
must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with 
the antique Prophets there. 

I do not agree with much modern criticism, 
in greatly preferring the Inferno to the two 
other parts of the Divine Commedia. Such 
preference belongs, I imagine, to our general 
Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient 
feeling. The Purgatorio and Paradiso, espe- 
cially the former, one would almost say, is even 
more excellent than it. It is a noble thing that 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 135 

Ptirgatorio, 'Mountain of Purification;' an 
emblem of the noblest conception of that age. 
If Sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so 
rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man 
'purified; Repentance is the grand Christian 
act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. 
The tremolar deWonde, that 'trembling' of 
the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of 
morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, 
i is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has 
now dawned ; never-dying Hope, if in company 
still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn 
of demons and reprobate is underfoot ; a soft 
breathing of penitence mounts higher and 
higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. 'Pray 
for me, ' the denizens of that Mount of Pain 
all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray 
for me," my daughter Giovanna; "I think her 
mother loves me no more!" They toil pain- 
fully up by that winding steep, 'bent-down 
like corbels of a building,' some of them, — ■ 
crushed together so 'for the sin of pride;' yet, 
nevertheless, in years, in ages and seons, they 
shall have reached the top, which is Heaven's 
gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted 
in. The joy, too, of all, when one has pre- 
vailed ; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, 
and a psalm of praise rises when one soul has 
perfected repentance, and got its sin and mis- 
ery left behind ! I call all this a noble em- 
bodiment of a true noble thought. 

But, indeed, the Three compartments mutu- 
ally support one another, are indispensable to 
one another. The Paradiso, a kind of inartic- 



136 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ulate music to me, is the redeeming side of the 
Inferno ; the Inferno without it were untrue. 
All three make-up the true Unseen World, as 
figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; 
a thing forever memorable, forever true in the 
essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps 
delineated in no human soul with such depth 
of veracity as in this of Dante's; a man sent to 
sing it, to keep it long memorable. Very not° 
able with what brief simplicity he passes out 
of the every-day reality, into the Invisible 
one; and in the second or third stanza, we 
find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and 
dwell there, as among things palpable, indub- 
itable! To Dante they were so; the real 
world, as it is called, and its facts, was but the 
threshold to an infinitely higher Fact of a 
World. At bottom, the one was as preternat° 
ural as the other. Has not each man a soul? 
He will not only be a spirit, but is one. To 
the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he 
believes it, sees it ; is the Poet of it in virtue 
of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the saving 
merit, now as always. 

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, arc a 
symbol withal, an emblematic representation 
of his Belief about this Universe : — some Critic 
in a future age, like some Scandinavian ones 
the other day, who has ceased altogether to 
think as Dante did, may find this too all an 
* Allegory,' perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a 
sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul 
of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge 
worldwide architectural emblems, how the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 137 

Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the 
two polar elements of this Creation, on which 
it all turns; that these two differ not by pre- 
ferability of one to the other, but by incompat- 
ibility absolute and infinite ; that the one is 
excellent and high as light and Heaven, the 
other hideous, black as Gehenna and the Pit of 
Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, 
with everlasting Pity, — all Christianism, as 
Dante and the Middle Ages had it, is emblemed 
here. Emblemed; and yet, as I urged the 
other day, with what entire truth of purpose ; 
how unconscious of any embleming! Hell, 
Purgatory, Paradise; these things were not 
fashioned as emblems; was there, in our Mod- 
ern European Mind, any thought at all of their 
being emblems? Were they not indubitable 
awful facts; the whole heart of man taking 
them for practically true, all Nature every- 
where confirming them? So is it always in 
these things. Men do not believe an Allegory. 
The future Critic, whatever his new thought 
may be, who considers this of Dante to have 
been all got-up as an Allegory, will. commit 
one sore mistake ! — Paganism we recognized as 
a veracious expression of the earnest awe- 
struck feeling of man toward the Universe; 
veracious, true once, and still not without 
worth for us. But mark here the difference of 
Paganism and Christianism ; one great differ- 
ence. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Opera- 
tions of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combi- 
nations, vicissitudes of things and men in this 
world; Christianism emblemed the Law of 

10 Heroes 



138 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One 
was for the sensuous nature; a rude helpless 
utterance of the first Thought of men, — the 
chief recognized virtue, Courage, Superiority 
to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous 
nature, but for the moral. What a progress is 
here, if in that one respect only! — 

And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten 
silent centuries, in a very strange way, found 
a voice. The Divina Commedia is of Dante's 
writing; yet in truth it belongs to ten Chris- 
tian centuries, only the finishing of it is 
Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, 
the smith with that metal of his, with these 
tools, with these cunning methods, — how little 
of all he does is properly his work ! All past 
inventive men work there with him ; — as, in- 
deed, with all of us, in all things. Dante is the 
spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought 
they lived by stands here, in everlasting music. 
These sublime ideas of his, terrible and beau- 
tiful, are the fruit of the Christian Meditations 
of all the good men who had gone before him. 
Precious they; but also is not he precious? 
Much, had not he spoken, would have been 
dumb; not dead, yet living voiceless. 

On the whole, is it not an utterance, this 
mystic Song at once of one of the greatest hu- 
man souls, and of the highest thing that 
Europe had hitherto realized for itself? Chris- 
tianism, as Dante sings it, is another than 
Paganism in the rude Norse mind, another 
than ' Bastard Christianism, ' half-articulately 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 139 

ie 3 spoken in the Arab Desert seven hundred 
s&years before! — The noblest idea made real 
chitherto among men, is sung, and emblemed 
7 forth abidingly, by one of the noblest men. 
jiln the one sense, and in the other, are we not 
i right glad to possess it? As I calculate, it may 
last yet for long thousands of years. For the 
thing that is uttered from the inmost parts of 
a man's soul, differs altogether from what is 
uttered by the outer part. The outer is of the 
day, under the empire of mode; the outer 
passes away, in swift endless changes; the 
; inmost is the same yesterday, to-day and for- 
sever. True souls, in all generations of the 
world, who look on this Dante, will find a 
i brotherhood in him; the deep sincerity of this 
thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak like- 
wise to their sincerity; they will feel that this 
Dante, too, was a brother. Napoleon in Saint 
Helena is charmed with the genial veracity of 
old Homer. The oldest Hebrew Prophet, 
under a vesture the most diverse from ours, 
does yet, because he speaks from the heart of 
man, speak to all men's hearts. It is the one 
sole secret of continuing long memorable. 
Dante, for depth of sincerity, is like an antique 
Prophet, too ; his words, like theirs, come from 
his very heart. One need not wonder if it 
were predicted that his Poem might be the 
most enduring thing our Europe has yet made ; 
for nothing so endures as a truly spoken word. 
All cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone, 
and outer arrangement never so lasting, are 
brief in comparison to an unfathomable heart- 



140 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

song like this ; one feels as it might survive, 
still of importance to men, when these had all 
sunk into new irrecognizable combinations, 
and had ceased individually to be. Europe 
has made much; great cities, great empires, 
encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and 
practice ; but it has made little of the class of 
Dante's Thought. Homer yet is, veritably 
present face to face with every open soul of 
its; and Greece, where is it? Desolate for 
thousands of years; away, vanished; a be- 
wildered heap of stones and rubbish, the life 
and existence of it all gone. Like a dream; 
like the dust of King Agamemnon! Greece 
was; Greece, except in the words it spoke, is 
not. 

The uses of this Dante? We will not say 
much about his 'uses. ' A human soul who 
had once got into that primal element of Song, 
and sung forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has 
worked in the depths of our existence; feed- 
ing through long times the life-roots of all ex- 
cellent human things whatsoever, — in a way 
that 'utilities' will not succeed well in calcu- 
lating! We will not estimate the Sun by the 
quantity of gas-light it saves us; Dante shall 
be invaluable, or of no value. One remark I 
may make ; the contrast in this respect between 
the Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a 
hundred years, Mahomet, as we saw, had his 
Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi; Dante's 
Italians seem to be yet very much where they 
were. Shall we say, then, Dante's effect on 
the world was small in comparison? Not so; 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 141 

his arena is far more restricted, but also it is 
far nobler, clearer; — perhaps not less, but 
more important. Mahomet speaks to great 
masses of men, in the coarse dialect adapted 
to such; a dialect rilled with inconsistencies, 
crudities, follies; on the great masses alone 
can he act, and there with good and with evil 
strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble, 
the pure and great, in all times and places. 
Neither does he grow obsolete, as the other 
does. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed there 
in the firmament, at which the great and the 
high of all ages kindle themselves; he is the 
possession of all the chosen of the world for 
uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may- 
long survive Mahomet. In this way the bal- 
ance may be made straight again. 

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called 
their effect on the world by what we can judge 
of their effect there, that a man and his work 
are measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? 
Let a man do his work; the fruit of it is the 
care of Another than he. It will grow its own 
fruit ; and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones 
and Arabian Conquests, so that it 'fills all 
Morning and Evening Newspapers,' and all 
Histories, which are a kind of distilled News- 
papers; or not embodied so at all; — what mat- 
ters that? That is not the real fruit of it! The 
Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did some- 
thing, was something. If the great Cause of 
Man, and Man's work in God's Earth, got no 
furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no 
matter how many scimetars he drew, how 



142 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

many gold piastres pocketed, and what uproar 
and blaring he made in this world, — he was 
but a loud sounding inanity and futility; at bot- 
tom, he was not at all. Let us honor the great 
empire of Silence, once more ! The boundless 
treasury which we do not jingle in our pock- 
ets, or count up and present before men! It 
is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each 
of us to do, in these loud times. 

As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our 
world to embody musically the Religion of the 
Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern 
Europe, its Inner Life; so Shakespeare, we 
may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our 
Europe as developed then, its chivalries, cour- 
tesies, humors, ambitions, what practical way 
of thinking, acting, looking at the world, men 
then had. As in Homer we may still construe 
Old Greece; so in Shakespeare and Dante, 
after thousands of years, what our modern 
Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still 
be legible. Dante has given us the Faith or 
soul; Shakespeare, in a not less noble way, 
has given us the Practice or body. This latter 
also we were to have ; a man was sent for it, 
the man Shakespeare. Just when that chival- 
ry way of life had reached its last finish, and 
was on the point of breaking down into slow 
or swift dissolution, as we now see it every- 
where, this other sovereign Poet, with his see- 
ing eye, with his perennial singing voice, was ' 
sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring 
record of it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 143 

1 as the central fire of the world ; Shakespeare, 
1 wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper 
"'light of the world. Italy produced the one 
• world- voice ; we English had the honor of pro- 
ducing the other. 

Curious enough how, as it were by mere acci- 
dent, this man came to us. I think always, so 
'great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this 
Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not 
prosecuted him for deer-stealing, we had per- 
haps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods 
and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford 
there, had been enough for this man! But, 
indeed, that strange outbudding of our whole 
English Existence, which we call the Eliza- 
bethan Era, did not it too come as of its 
own accord? The 'Tree IgdrasiT buds and 
withers by its own laws, — too deep for our scan- 
ning. Yet it does bud and wither, and every 
bouggh and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal 
laws; not a Sir Thomas Lucy but comes at the 
ihour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not suffi- 
ciently considered: how everything does co- 
operate with all ; not a leaf rotting on the high- 
way but is indissoluble portion of solar and 
! stellar systems ; no thought, word or act of 
;man but has sprung withal out of all men, and 
works sooner or later, recognizably, or irrecog- 
: nizably on all men ! It is all a Tree : circula- 
' tion of sap and influences, mutual communica- 
ttion of every minutest leaf with the lowest 
1 talon of a root, with every other greatest and 
minutest portion of the whole. The Tree 
'Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the King- 



144 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

doms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs 
overspread the highest Heaven! — 

In some sense it may be said that this glori- 
ous Elizabethan Era with its Shakespeare, as 
the outcome and flowerage of all which had 
preceded it, is itself attributable to the Cathol- 
icism of the Middle Ages. The Christian 
Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, 
had produced this Practical Life which Shake- 
speare was to sing. For Religion then, as it 
now and always is, was the soul of Practice ; 
the primary vital fact in men's life. And re- 
mark here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age 
Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of 
Parliament could abolish it, before Shake- 
speare, the noblest product of it, made his 
appearance. He did make his appearance nev- 
ertheless. Nature at her own time, with 
Catholicism or what else might be necessary, 
sent him forth; taking small thought of Acts 
of Parliament. King-Henrys, Queen-Eliza- 
beths go their way; and Nature, too, goes hers. 
Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are small, 
notwithstanding the noise they make. What 
Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephen's, on 
the hustings or elsewhere, was it that brought 
this Shakespeare into being? No dining at 
Freemason's Tavern, opening subscription- 
lists, selling of shares, and infinite other jang- 
ling and true or false endeavoring! This 
Elizabethan Era, and all its nobleness and 
blessedness, came without proclamation, prepa- 
ration of ours. Priceless Shakespeare was the 
free gift of Nature ; given altogether silently ; 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 145 

— received altogether silently, as if it had been 
a thing of little account. And yet, very liter- 
ally, it is a priceless thing. One should look 
at that side of matters too. 

Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the 
opinion one sometimes hears a little idola- 
trously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I 
think the best judgment not of this country 
only, but of Europe at large, is slowly point- 
ing to the conclusion, That Shakespeare is the 
chief of all Poets hitherto ; the greatest intel- 
lect who, in our recorded world, has left record 
of himself in the way of Literature. On the 
whole, I know not such a power of vision, such 
a faculty of thought, if we take all the charac- 
ters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness 
of depth; placid joyous strength; all things 
imaged in that great soul of his so true and 
clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It 
has been said, that in the constructing of 
Shakespeare's Dramas there is, apart from all 
other 'faculties' as they are called, an under- 
standing manifested, equal to that in Bacon's 
Novum Organum. That is true; and it is not 
a truth that strikes very one. It would become 
more apparent if we tried, any of us for him- 
self, how, out of Shakespeare's dramatic mate- 
rials, we could fashion such a result! The 
built house seems all so fit, — everyway as it 
should be, as if it came there by its own law 
and the nature of things, — we forget the rude 
disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The 
very perfection of the house, as if Nature her- 
self had made it, hides the builder's merit 

10 



146 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Perfect, more perfect than any other man, we 
may call Shakespeare in this; he discerns, 
knows as by instinct, what condition he works 
under, what his materials are, what his own 
force and its relation to them is. It is not a 
transitory glance of insight that will suffice ; 
it is deliberate illumination of the whole mat- 
ter; it is a calmly seeing eye; a great intellect, 
in short. How a man, of some wide thing that 
he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, 
what kind of picture and delineation he will 
give of it, — is the best measure you could get 
of what intellect is in the man. Which circum- 
stance is vital and shall stand prominent; 
which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where 
is the true beginning, the true sequence and 
ending? To find out this you task the whole 
force of insight that is in the man. He must 
understand the thing; according to the depth 
of his understanding, will the fitness of his 
answer be. You will try him so. Does like 
join itself to like: does the spirit of method 
stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment 
becomes order? Can the man say, Fiat lux, 
Let there be light; and out of chaos make a 
world? Precisely as there is light in himself, 
will he accomplish this. 

Or, indeed, we may say again, it is in what I 
called Portrait-painting, delineating of men 
and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare 
is great. All the greatness of the man comes 
out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, 
that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. 
The thing he looks at reveals not this or that 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 147 

eface of it, but its inmost heart and generic 
secret; it dissolves itself as in light before 

i him so that he discerns the perfect structure of 

i it. Creative, we said ; poetic creation, what is 
this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The 
word that will describe the thing, follows of it- 

. self from such clear intense sight of the thing. 
And is not Shakespeare's morality, his valor, 
candor, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole vic- 
torious strength and greatness, which can tri- 
umph over such obstructions, visible there too? 
Great as the world! No twisted, poor convex- 
concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its 

i own convexities and concavities ; a perfectly 
level mirror, — that is to say withal, if we will 
understand it, a man justly related to all 
things and men, a good man. It is truly a 
lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all 
kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an 
Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all 
forth to us in their round completeness ; lov- 
ing, just, the equal brother of all. Novum 
Organum, and all the intellect you will find in 
Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthly 
material, poor in comparison with this. Among 
modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost 
nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since 
the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. 
Of him too you say that he saw the object; you 
may say what he himself sa3^s of Shakespeare: 
'His characters are like watches wirh dial- 
plates of transparent crystal; Vaey show you 
the hour like others, and the iaward mechan- 
ism also is all visible. ° 



148 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the 
inner harmony of things; what Nature meant, 
what musical idea Nature has wrapped-up in 
these often rough embodiments. Something 
she did mean. To the seeing eye that some- 
thing were discernible. Are they base, miser- 
able things? You can laugh over them, you 
can weep over them ; you can in some way or 
other genially relate yourself to them; — you 
can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, 
turn away your own and others' face from 
them, till the hour come for practically exter- 
minating and extinguishing them! At bot- 
tom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, 
that he have intellect enough. He will be a 
Poet if he have ; a Poet in word ; or failing 
that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. 
Whether he write at all ; and if so, whether in 
prose or in verse, will depend on accidents; 
who knows on what extremely trivial accidents, 
— perhaps on his having had a singing master, 
on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! 
But the faculty which enables him to discern 
the inner heart of things, and the harmony 
that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a 
harmony in the heart of it, or it would not 
hold together and exist), is not the result of 
habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature her- 
self ; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in 
what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every 
other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot 
do that, it is of no use to keep stringing 
rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against 
each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 149 

no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose 
or verse, in action or speculation, all manner 
of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used 
to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 
"But are ye sure he's not a dunce?" Why, 
really one might ask the same thing, in regard 
to every man proposed for whatsoever func- 
tion ; and consider it as the one inquiry need- 
ful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce? There is, 
in this world, no other entirely fatal person. 

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that 
dwells in a man is a correct measure of the 
man. If called to define Shakespeare's faculty, 
II should say superiority of Intellect, and think 
II had included all under that. What, indeed, 
are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they 
were distinct, things separable; as if a man 
ihad intellect, imagination,, fancy, etc., as he 
has hands, feet and arms. That is a capital 
error. Then again, we hear of a man's 'intel- 
lectual nature,' and of his 'moral nature,' as 
iif these again were divisible, and existed 
apart. Necessities of language do perhaps 
I prescribe such forms of utterance; we must 
speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to 
: speak at all. But words ought not to harden 
iinto things for us. It seems to me our appre- 
Ihension of this matter is, for the most part, 
i radically falsified thereby. We ought to know 
< withal, and to keep forever in mind, that these 
(divisions are at bottom but names; that man's 
•spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells 
iin him, is essentially one and indivisible; that 
'what we call imagination, fancy, understand- 



150 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ing, and so forth, are but different figures of 
the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly 
connected with each other, physiognomically 
related; that if we knew one of them, we 
might know all of them. Morality itself, what 
we call the moral quality of a man, what is this 
but another side of the one vital Force whereby 
he is and works? All that a man does is physi- 
ognomical of him. You may see how a man 
would fight, by the way in which he sings ; his 
courage, or want of courage, is visible in the 
word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, 
no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is 
one ; and preaches the same Self abroad in all 
these ways. 

Without hands a man might have feet, and 
could still walk; but, consider it, — without 
morality, intellect were impossible for him; a 
thoroughly immoral man could not know any- 
thing at all! To know a thing, what we can 
call knowing, a man must first love the thing, 
sympathize with it ; that is, be virtuously re- 
lated to it. If he have not the justice to put 
down his own selfishness at every turn, the 
courage to stand by the dangerous — turn at 
every turn, how shall he know? His virtues, 
all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge. 
Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to 
the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a 
sealed book : what such can know of Nature is 
mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day 
merely. — But does not the very Fox know 
something of Nature? Exactly so; it knows 
where the geese lodge! The human Rey- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 151 

nard, very frequent everywhere in the world, 
what more does he know but this and the like 
of this? Nay, it should be considered, too, 
that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine mor- 
ality, he could not even know where the geese 
were, or get at the geese! If he spent his 
time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his 
own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune 
and other Foxes, and so forth; and had not 
courage, promptitude, practicality, and other 
suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would 
catch no geese. We may say of the Fox, too, 
that his morality and insight are of the same 
dimensions; different faces of the same inter- 
nal unity of vulpine life! — These things are 
worth stating; for the contrary of them acts 
with manifold very baleful perversion, in this 
time; what limitations, modifications they 
acquire, your own candor will supply. 

If I say, therefore, that Shakespeare is the 
greatest of Intellects, I have said all concern- 
ing him. But there is more in Shakespeare's 
intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I 
call an unconscious intellect; there is more 
virtue in it than he himself is aware of. Nov- 
alis beautifully remarks of him, that those 
Dramas of his are Products of Nature too, deep 
as Nature herself. I find a great truth in his 
sa3nng. Shakespeare's Art is not Artifice ; the 
noblest worth of it is not there by plan or pre- 
contrivance. It grows-up from the deeps of 
Nature, though this noble sincere soul, who is 
a voice of Nature. The lastest generations of 
men will find new meanings in Shakespeare, 



152 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

new elucidations of their own human being; 
4 new harmonies with the infinite structure of 
the Universal concurrences with later ideas, 
affinities with the higher powers and senses of 
man. ' This well deserves meditating. It is 
Nature's highest reward to a true simple great 
soul, that he get thus to be a part of herself. 
Such a man's works, whatsoever he with utmost 
conscious exertion and forethought shall 
accomplish, grow up withal unconsciously, from 
the unknown deeps in him; — as the oak-tree 
grows from the Earth's bosom, as the moun- 
tains and waters shape themselves; with a 
symmetry grounded on Nature's own laws, 
conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How 
much in Shakespeare lies hid ; his sorrows, his 
silent struggles known to himself; much that 
was not known at all, not speakable at all : like 
roots, like sap and forces working under- 
ground ! Speech is great ; but Silence is greater. 
Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is 
notable. I will not blame Dante for his mis- 
ery ; it is as battle without victory ; but true 
battle, — the first, indispensable thing. Yet I 
call Shakespeare greater than Dante in that he 
fought truly and did conquer. Doubt it not, 
he had his own sorrows: those Sonnets of his 
will even testify expressly in what deep waters 
he had waded, and swum struggling for his 
life ; — as what man like him ever failed to have 
to do? It seems to me a heedless notion, our 
common one, that he sat like a bird on the 
bough ; and sang forth free and offhand, never 
knowing the troubles of other men. Not so, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 153 

with no man is it so. How could a man travel 
forward from rustic deer-poaching to such 
tragedy-writing, and not fall-in with sorrows 
by the way? Or, still better, how could a man 
delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, 
so many suffering heroic hearts, if his own 
heroic heart had never suffered? — And now, in 
contrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, 
his genuine overflowing love of laughter! 
You would say, in no point does he exaggerate 
but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, 
words that pierce and burn, are to be found in 
Shakespeare ; yet he is always in measure here ; 
never what Johnson would remark as a spe- 
cially 'good hater. ' But his laughter seems to 
pour from him in floods; he heaps all manner 
of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is ban- 
tering, tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of 
horse-play; you would say, with his whole 
heart laughs. And then, if not always the 
finest, it is always a genial laughter. Not at 
mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never.. 
No man who can laugh, what we call laugh- 
ing, will laugh at these things. It is some 
poor character only desiring to laugh, and have 
the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter 
means sympathy; good laughter is not 'the 
crackling of thorns under the pot. ' Even at 
stupidity and pretension this Shakespeare does 
not laugh otherwise than genially. Dogberry 
and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we 
dismiss them covered with explosions of laugh- 
ter; but we like the poor fellows only the bet- 
ter for our laughing; and hope they will get on 



154 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

well there, and continue Presidents of the 
City-watch. Such laughter, like sunshine on 
the deep sea, is very beautiful to me. 

We have no room to speak of Shakespeare's 
individual works; though perhaps there is 
much still waiting to be said on that head. 
Had we, for instance, all his plays reviewed as 
Hamlet, in Wilhelm Meister, is! A thing 
which might, one day, be done. August Wil- 
helm Schlegel has a remark on his Historical 
Plays, Henry Fifth and the others, which is 
worth remembering. He calls them a kind of 
National Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, 
said, he knew no English History but what he 
had learned from Shakespeare. There are 
really, if we look to it, few as memorable His- 
tories. The great sailent points are admirably 
seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of 
rhythmic coherence; it is, as Schlegel says, 
epic; — as indeed all delineation by a great 
thinker will be. There are right beautiful 
things in those Pieces, which indeed together 
form one beautiful thing. That battle of 
Agincourt strikes me as one of the most per- 
fect things, in its sort, we anywhere have of 
Shakespeare's. The description of the two 
hosts; the worn-out, jaded English; the dread 
hour, big with destiny, when the battle shall 
begin; and then that deathless valor: "Ye good 
yeoman, whose limbs were made in England!" 
There is a noble Patriotism in it, — far other 
than the 'indifference' you sometimes hear Ji 
ascribed to Shakespeare. A true English heart 



tiMnrtHiilli'- ' • *-^~ 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 155 

] breathes, calm and strong, through the whole 

business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the 

better for that. There is a sound in it like the 

, ring of steel. This man too had a right stroke 

in him, had it come to that! 

But I say, of Shakespeare's works generally, 
that we have no full impress of him there; 
even as full as we have of many men. His 
works are so many windows, through which we 
I see a glimpse of the world that was in him. 
, All his works seem, comparatively speaking, 
I cursory, imperfect, written under cramping cir- 
cumstances; giving only here and there a note 
!of the full utterance of the man. Passages 
, there are that come upon you like splendor out 
of Heaven; bursts of radiance, illuminating 
,the very heart of the thing: you say, "That is 
true, spoken once and forever; wheresoever 
and whensoever there is an open human soul, 
jthat will be recognized as true!" Such bursts, 
I however, make us feel that the surrounding 
matter is not radiant; that it is, in part, tem- 
porary, conventional. Alas, Shakespeare had 
to write for the Globe Playhouse: his great 
soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that 
(■and no other mould. It was with him, then, 
fas it is with us all. No man works save under 
(conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own 
ifree Thought before us; but his Thought as 
he could translate it into the stone that was 
.given, with the tools that were given. Disjecta 
membra are all that we find of any Poet, or of 
.any man. 



156 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shake- 
speare may recognize that he too was a 
Prophet, in his way: of an insight analogous 
to the Prophetic, though he took it up in 
another strain. Nature seemed to this man 
also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, 
high as Heaven: 'We are such stuff as Dreams 
are made of!' That scroll in Westminster 
Abbey, which few read with understanding, is 
of the depth of any seer. But the man sang; 
did not preach, except musically. We called 
Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-age 
Catholicism. May we not call Shakespeare the 
still more melodious Priest of a true Cathol- 
icism, the * Universal Church' of the Future 
and of all times? No narrow superstition, 
harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierce- 
ness or perversion: a Revelation, so far as it 
goes, that such a thousand-fold hidden beauty 
and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let 
all men worship as they can ! We may say 
without offense, that there rises a kind of uni- 
versal Psalm out of this Shakespeare too; not 
unfit to make itself heard among the still more 
sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony with these, 
if we understood them, but in harmony! — I 
cannot call this Shakespeare a 'Sceptic,' as 
some do; his indifference to the creeds and 
theological quarrels of his time misleading 
them. No: neither unpatriotic, though he 
says little about his Patriotism; nor sceptic, 
though he says little about his Faith Such 
'indifference' was the fruit of his greatness 
withal: his whole heart was in his own grand 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 157 

sphere of worship (we may call it such) ; these 
other controversies, vitally important to other 
men, were not vital to him. 

But call it worship, call it what you will, is 
it not a right glorious thing, and set of things, 
this that Shakespeare has brought us? For 
myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of 
sacredness in the fact of such a man being sent 
into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all; a 
blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light? — And, 
j at bottom, was it not perhaps far better that 
.this Shakespeare, everyway an unconscious 
man, was conscious of no Heavenly message? 
He did not feel, like Mahomet, because he saw 
.into those internal Splendors, that he specially 
was the 'Prophet of God:' and was he not 
greater than Mahomet in that? Greater; and 
also, if we compute strictly, as we did in 
Dante's case, more successful. It was intrins- 
ically an error, that notion of Mahomet's, of 
his supreme Prophethood; and has come down 
to us inextricably involved in error to this day; 
dragging along with it such a cOil of fables, 
impurities, intolerances, as makes it a ques- 
tionable step for me here and now to say, as I 
have done, that Mahomet was a true Speaker 
at all, and not rather an ambitious charlatan, 
perversity and simulacrum ; no Speaker, but a 
Babbler! Even in Arabia, as I compute, 
Mahomet will have exhausted himself and 
become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this 
Dante may still be young; — while this Shake- 
speare may still pretend to a Priest of Man- 



158 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

kind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlim- 
ited periods to come ! 

Compared with any speaker or singer one 
knows, even with ^Eschylus or Homer, why 
should he not, for veracity and universality, 
last like them? He is sincere as they; reaches 
deep down like them, to the universal and per- 
ennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had 
been better for him not to be so conscious! 
Alas, poor Mahomet; all that he was conscious 
of was a mere error; a futility and triviality, — 
as indeed such ever is. The truly great in him 
too was the unconscious: that he was a wild 
Arab lion of the desert, and did speak out with 
that great thunder- voice of his, not by words 
which he thought to be great, but by actions, 
by feelings, by a history which were great! 
His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix 
absurdity; we do not believe, like him, that 
God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as 
always, is a Force of Nature: whatsoever is 
truly great in him springs up from the inartic- w 
ulate deeps. 



Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peas- 
ant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, 
so that he could live without begging; whom 
the Earl of Southampton cast some kind I 
glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, manyjio 
thanks to him, was for sending to the Tread- 
mill! We did not account him a god, like 
Odin, while he dwelt with us.; — on which point 
there were much to be said. But I will say 
rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state 



i: 



h 






LECTURES ON HEROES. 159 



Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this 
Shakespeare has actually become among us. 
Which Englishman we ever made, in this land 
of ours, which million of Englishmen, would 
we not give up rather than the Stratford 
Peasant? There is no regiment of highest 
Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is 
the grandest thing we have yet done. For 
our honor among foreign nations, as an orna- 
ment to our English . Household, what item is 
.there that we would not surrender rather than 
him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will 
; you give up your Indian Empire or your Shake- 
speare, you English; never have had any 
, Indian Empire, or never have had any Shake- 
speare? Really it were a grave question. 
; Official persons would answer doubtless in of- 
jficial language ; but we, for our part too, should 
jnot we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, 
;or no Indian Empire, we cannot do without 
i Shakespeare ! Indian Empire will go, at any 
rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not 
go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give 
up our Shakespeare! 

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and consid- 
ering him merely as a real, marketable, tang- 
libly-useful possession. England, before long, 
this island of ours, will hold but a small frac- 
tion of the English : in America, in New Hol- 
land, east and west to the very Antipodes, 
ithere will be a Saxondom covering great spaces 
m the Globe. And now, what is it that can 
<s:eep all these together into virtually one 
; Nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, 



160 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse 
helping one another? This is justly regarded 
as the greatest practical problem, the thing al 
manner of sovereignties and governments are 
here to accomplish : what is it that will accom 
plish this? Acts of Parliament, administrative 
prime-ministers cannot. America is partec 
from us, so far as Parliament could part it, 
Call it not fantastic, for there is much realit} 
in it: Here, I say, is an English King, whom 
no time or chance, Parliament or combination 
of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King 
Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned sov- 
ereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, 
yet strongest of all rallying signs; indestructi 
ble ; really more valuable in that point of view 
than any other means or appliance whatsoever? 
We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the 
Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years 
hence. From Paramatta, from New York, 
wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Con- 
stable soever, English men and women are, 
they will say to one another: "Yes, this 
Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we 
speak and think by him ; we are of one blood 
and kind with him. " The most common-sense 
politician, too, if he pleases, may think of that. 
Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation 
that it get an articulate voice ; that it produce 
a man who will speak-forth melodiously what 
the heart of it means! Italy, for example, 
poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, 
not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a 
unity at all ; yet the noble Italy is actually 



LECTURES ON HEROES. It 

one: Italy produced its Dante; Italy can 
speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is 
strong, with so many bayonets, Cossacks and 
cannons; and does a great feat in keeping such 
a tract of Earth politically together; but he 
cannot yet speak. Something great in him, 
but it is a dumb greatness. He has had no 
voice of genius, to be heard of all men and 
times. He must learn to speak. He is a great 
dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and 
Cossacks will all have rusted into nonentity, 
while that Dante's voice is still audible. The 
Nation that has a Dante is bound together as 
no dumb Russia can be. — We must here end 
what we had to say of the Hero-Poet. 



11 Heroes 



LECTURE IV. 

THE HERO AS PRIEST. LUTHER; REFORMATION 
KNOX; PURITANISM. 

[Friday, 15th May, 1840.] 

Our present discourse is to be of the Great 
Man as Priest. We have repeatedly endeav- 
ored to explain that all sorts of Heroes are 
intrinsically of the same material ; that given 
a great soul, open to the Divine Significance 
of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak 
of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for 
this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; 
there is given a Hero, — the outward shape of 
whom will depend on the time and the envir- 
onment he finds himself in. The Priest too, 
as I understand it, is a kind of Prophet; in him 
too there is required to be a light of inspira- 
tion, as we must name it. He presides over 
the worship of the people; is the Uniter of 
them with the Unseen Holy. He is the spirit- 
ual Captain of the people; as the Prophet is 
their spiritual King with many captains: he 
guides them heavenward, by wise guidance 
through this Earth and its work. The ideal of 
him is, that he too be what we can call a voice 
from the unseen Heaven: interpreting, even 
as the Prophet did, and in a more familiar 
manner unfolding the same to men. The 
162 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 163 

unseen Heaven, — the 'open secret of the Uni- 

I verse,' — which so few have an eye for! He is 

| the Prophet shorn of his more awful splendor; 

burning with mild equable radiance, as the 

i ; enlightner of daily life. This, I say, is the ideal 

of a Priest. So in old times; so in these, and 

in all times. One knows very well that, in 

reducing ideals to practice, great latitude of 

1 tolerance is needful ; very great. But a Priest 

who is not this at all, who does not any longer 

aim or try to be this, is a character — of whom 

we had rather not speak in this place. 

Luther and Knox were by express vocation 
i r Priests, and did faithfully perform that func- 
jition in its common sense. Yet it will suit us 
better here to consider them chiefly in their 
! historical character, rather as Reformers than 
' Priests. There have been other Priests per- 
haps equally notable, in calmer times, for 
doing faithfully the office of a Leader of Wor- 
ship; bringing down, by faithful heroism in 
that kind, a light from Heaven into the daily 
life of their people ; leading them forward, as 
under God's guidance, in the way wherein they 
were to go. But when this same way was a 
rrough one, of battle, confusion and danger, the 
spiritual Captain, who led through that, 
; becomes, especially to us who live under the 
fruit of his leading, more notable that any 
other. Pie is the warfaring and battling 
Priest; who led his people, not to quiet faith- 
ful labor as in smooth times, but to faithful 
valorous conflict, in times all violent, dis- 
membered: a more perilous service, and a 



164 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

more memorable one, be it higher or not. 
These two men we will account our best 
Priests, inasmuch as they were our best, 
Reformers. Nay I may ask, Is not every true 
Reformer, by the nature of him, a Priest first 
of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisible 
justice against Earth's visible force; knows 
that it, the invisible, is strong and alone 
strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of 
things; a seer, seeing through the shows of 
things; a worshipper, in one way or the other, 
of the divine truth of things; a Priest that is. 
If he be not first a Priest, he will never be 
good for much as a reformer. 

Thus then, as we have seen Great Men, in 
various situations, building up Religious, 
heroic Forms of human Existence of this world, 
Theories of Life worthy to be sung by a Dante, 
Practices of Life by a Shakespeare, — we are 
now to see the reserve process; which also is 
necessary, which also may be carried on in the 
Heroic manner. Curious how this should be 
necessary : yet necessary it is. The mild 
shining of the Poet's light has to give place to 
the fierce lightning of the Reformer: unfortun- 
ately the Reformer too is a personage that 
cannot fail in History! The Poet indeed, with 
his mildness, what is he but the product and 
ultimate adjustment of Reform, or Prophecy, 
with its fierceness? No wild Saint Dominies 
and Thebaid Eremites, there had been no 
melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavor, 
Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter 
Raleigh, fromU"lfilatoCranmer, enabled Shake- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 165 

speare to speak. Nay the finished Poet, I 
remark sometimes, is a symptom that his 
epoch itself has reached perfection and is fin- 
ished ; that before long there will be a new 
epoch, new Reformers needed. 

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along 
always in the way of music; be tamed and 
taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures were 
by their Orpheus of old. Or failing this 
rhythmic musical way, how good were it could 
we get so much as into the equable way; I 
mean, if peaceable Priests, reforming from day 
to day, would always suffice us! But it is not 
so; even this latter has not been realized. 
Alas, the battling Reformer too is, from time 
to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. 
Obstructions are never wanting: the very 
things that were once indispensable further- 
ances become obstructions; and need to be 
shaken off, and left behind us, — a business often 
of enormous difficulty. It is notable enough, 
surely, how a Theorem or spiritual Repre- 
sentation, so we may call it, which once too in 
the whole Universe, and was completely satis- 
factory in all parts of it to the highly discurs- 
ive acute intellect of Dante, one of the great- 
est in the world, — had in the course of another 
century become dubitable to common intel- 
lects; become deniable; and is now, to every 
one of us, flatly incredible, obsolete as Odin's 
Theorem! To Dante, human Existence, and 
God's ways with men, were all well repre- 
sented by those Malebolges, Purgatorios; to 
Luther not well. How was this? Why could 



166 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

not Dante's Catholicism continue; but Luther's 
Protestantism must needs follow? Alas, noth- 
ing will continue. 

I do not make much of 'Progress of the 
Species,' as handled in these times of ours; nor 
do I think you would care to hear much about 
it. The talk on that subject is too often of the 
most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I may 
say, the fact itself seems certain enough ; nay 
we can trace out the inevitable necessity of it 
in the nature of things. Every man, as I have 
stated somewhere, is not only a learner but a 
doer: he learns with the mind given him what 
has been; but with the same mind he discov- 
ers farther, he invents and devises somewhat 
of his own. Absolutely without originality 
there is no man. No man whatever believes, 
or can believe, exactly what his grandfather 
believed : he enlarges somewhat, by fresh dis- 
covery, his view of the Universe, and conse- 
quently his Theorem of the Universe, — which 
is an infinite Universe, and can never be 
embraced wholly or finally by any view or 
Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement: he 
enlarges somewhat, I say: finds somewhat that 
was credible to his grandfather incredible to 
him, false to him, inconsistent with some new 
thing he has discovered or observed. It is the 
history of every man; and in the history of 
Mankind we see it summed up into great his- 
torical amounts, — revolutions, new epochs. 
Dante's Mountain of Purgatory does not stand 
in the ocean of the other Hemisphere,' when 
Columbus has once sailed thither! Men find no 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 167 

such thing extant in the other Hemisphere. 
It is not there. It must cease to be believed 
to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever in 
this world, — all Systems of Belief, and Sys- 
tems of Practice that spring from these. 

If we add now the melancholy fact, that 
when Belief waxes uncertain, Practice too 
becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and 
miseries everywhere more and more prevail, 
we shall see material enough for revolution. 
At all turns, a man who will do faithfully, 
needs to believe firmly. If he have to ask at 
every turn the world's suffrage; if he cannot 
dispense with the world's suffrage, and make 
his own suffrage serve, he is a poor eye-serv- 
ant; the work committed to him will be mis- 
done. Every such man is a daily contributor 
to the inevitable downfall. Whatsoever work 
he does, dishonestty, with an eye to the out- 
ward look of it, is a new offense, parent of new 
misery to somebody or other. Offenses accum- 
ulate till they become insupportable ; and are 
then violently burst through, cleared off as by 
explosion. Dante's sublime Catholicism, 
incredible now in theory, and defaced still 
worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest 
practice, has to be torn asunder by a Luther: 
Shakespeare's noble Feudalism, as beautiful as 
it once looked and was, has to end in a French 
Revolution. The accumulation of offenses is, 
as we say, too literally exploded, blasted asun- 
der volcanically ; and there are long troublous 
periods before matters come to a settlement 
aeain. 



168 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Surely it were mournful enough to look only 
at this face of the matter, and find in all 
human opinions and arrangements merely the 
fact that they were uncertain, temporary, sub- 
ject to the law of death ! At bottom, it is not 
so : all death, here too we find, is but of the 
body, not of the essence or soul; all destruc- 
tion, by violent revolution or howsoever it be, 
is but new creation on a wider scale. Odinism 
was Valor; Christianism was Humility, a 
nobler kind of Valor. No thought that ever 
dwelt honestly as true in the heart of man but 
was an honest insight into God's truth on 
man's part, and has an essential truth in it 
which endures through all changes, an ever- 
lasting possession for us all. And, on the 
other hand, what a melancholy notion is that, 
which has to represent all men, in all coun- 
tries and times except our own, as having 
spent their life in blind condemnable error, 
mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, 
only that we might have the true ultimate 
knowledge! All generations of men were lost 
and wrong, only that this present little section 
of a generation might be saved and right. 
They all marched forward there, all genera- 
tions since the beginning of the world, like 
the Russian soldiers into the ditch of Schweid- 
nitz Fort, only to fill up the ditch with their 
dead bodies, that we might march over and 
take the place ! It is an incredible hypothesis. 

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen 
maintained with fierce emphasis; and this or 
the other poor individual man, with his sect 




Death of his friend Alexis, by lightning-." 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



Page 181. 



of individual men, marching as over the dead 
bodies of all men, toward sure victory: but 
when he too, with his hypothesis and ultimate 
infallible credo, sank into the ditch, and became 
a dead body, what was to be said? — Withal, it 
is an important fact in the nature of man, that 
he tends to reckon his own insight as final, and 
goes upon it as such. He will always do it, I 
suppose, in one or the other way ; but it must 
be in some wider, wiser way than this. Are 
not all true men that live, or that ever lived, 
soldiers of the same army, enlisted, under 
Heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the 
same enemy, the empire of Darkness and 
Wrong? Why should we misknow one 
another, fight not against the enemy but 
against ourselves, from mere difference of uni- 
form? All uniforms shall be good, so they 
hold in them true valiant men. All fashions 
of arms, the Arab turban and swift scimetar, 
Thor's strong hammer smiting down Jotuns, 
shall be welcome. Luther's battle-voice, 
Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are 
with us, not against us. We are all under one 
Captain, soldiers of the same host. — Let us 
now look a little at this Luther's fighting; 
what kind of battle it was, and how he com- 
ported himself in it. Luther too was of our 
spiritual Heroes ; a Prophet to his country and 
time. 

As introductory to the whole, a remark 
about Idolatry will perhaps be in place here. 
One of Mahomet's characteristics, which 

12 Heroes 



170 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

indeed belongs to all Prophets, is unlimited 
implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is the 
grand theme of Prophets : Idolatry, the wor- 
shiping of dead Idols as the Divinity, is a 
thing they cannot away-with, but have to 
denounce continually, and brand with inex- 
piable reprobation; it is the chief of all the 
sins they see done under the sun. This is 
worth noting. We will not enter here into 
the theological question about Idolatry. Idol 
is Eidolon, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not 
God, but a Symbol of God ; and perhaps one 
may question whether any the most benighted 
mortal- ever took it for more than a Symbol. 
I fancy, he did not think that the poor image 
his own hands had made was God ; but that 
God was emblemed by it, that God was in it 
some way or other. And now in this sense, 
one may ask, Is not all worship whatsoever a 
worship by Symbols, by eidola, or things seen? 
Whether seen, rendered visible as an image or 
picture to the bodily eye ; or visible only to the 
inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect: 
this makes a superficial, but no substantial 
difference. It is still a Thing Seen, significant 
of Godhead; an Idol. The most rigorous Pur- 
itan has his Confession of Faith, and intel- 
lectual Representation of Divine things, and 
worships thereby; thereby is worship first 
made possible for him. All creeds, liturgies, 
religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest 
religious feelings, are in this sense eidola, 
things seen. All worship whatsover must pro- 
ceed by Symbols, by Idols: — we may say, all 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 171 

Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry 
is only more idolatrous. 

Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatal 
evil must lie in it, or earnest prophetic men 
would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why 
is Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems to 
me as if, in the worship of those poor wooden 
symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked 
the Prophet, and filled his inmost soul with 
indignation and aversion, was not exactly what 
suggested itself to his own thought, and came 
out of him in words to others, as the thing. 
The rudest heathen that worshiped Canopus, 
or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was 
superior to the horse that worshiped nothing 
at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit 
in that poor act of his; analogous to what is 
still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a 
certain endless divine beauty and significance 
in stars and all natural objects whatsoever. 
Why should the Prophet so mercilessly condemn 
him? The poorest mortal worshiping his 
Fetish, while his heart is full of it, may be an 
object of pity, of contempt and avoidance, if 
you will; but cannot surely be an object of 
hatred. Let his heart be honestly full of it, 
the whole space of his dark narrow mind 
illumined thereby; in one word, let him 
entirely believe in his Fetish, — it will then be, 
I should say, if not well 'with him, yet as well 
as it can readily be made to be, and you will 
leave him alone, unmolested there. 

But here enters the fatal circumstance of 
Idolatry, that, in the era of the Prophets, no 



172 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

man's mind is any longer honestly filled with 
his Idol or Symbol. Before the Prophet can 
arise who, seeing through it, knows it to be 
mere wood, many men must have begun dimly 
to doubt that it was little more. Condemnable 
Idolatry is insincere Idolatry. Doubt has 
eaten out the heart of it: a human soul is seen 
clinging spasmodically to an Ark of the Cov- 
enant, which it half feels now to have become 
a Phantasm. This is one of the balefulest 
sights. Souls are no longer filled with their 
Fetish ; but only pretend to be filled, and would 
fain make themselves feel that they are filled. 
4 'You do not believe," said Coleridge; "you 
only believe that you believe." It is the final 
scene in all kinds of Worship and Symbolism ; 
the sure symptom that death is now nigh. It 
is equivalent to what we call Formulism, and 
Worship of Formulas, in these days of ours. 
No more immoral act can be done by a human 
creature; for it is the beginning of all immor- 
ality, or rather it is the impossibility henceforth 
of any morality whatsoever: the innermost 
moral soul is paralyzed thereby, cast into fatal 
magnetic sleep! Men are no longer sincere 
men. I do not wonder that the earnest man 
denounces this, brands it, prosecutes it with 
inextinguishable aversion. He and it, all good 
and it are at death-fued. Blamable Idolatry is 
Cant, and even what one may call Sincere- 
Cant. Sincere-Cant: that is worth thinking 
of! Every sort of Worship ends with this 
phasis. 

I find Luther to have been a Breaker of Idols 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 173 

no less than any other Prophet. The wooden 
gods of the Koreish, made of timber and bees- 
wax, where not more hateful to Mahomet than 
Tetzel's Pardons of Sin, made of sheepskin 
and ink, were to Luther. It is the property of 
every Hero, in every time, in every place and 
situation, that he come back to reality ; that 
he stand upon things, and not shows of things. 
According as he loves, and venerates, artic- 
ulately or with deep speechless thought, the 
awful realities of things, so will the hollow 
shows of things, however regular, decorous, 
accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intol- 
erable and detestable to him. Protestantism 
too is the work of a Prophet: the prophet- work 
of that sixteenth century. The first stroke of 
honest demolition to an ancient thing grown 
false and idolatrous ; preparatory afar off to a 
new thing, which shall be true, and authentic- 
ally divine! — 

At first view it might seem as if Protestant- 
ism were entirely destructive to this that we 
call Hero-worship, and represent as the basis 
of all possible good, religious or social, for 
mankind. One often hears it said that Protest- 
antism introduced a new era, radically differ- 
ent from any the world had ever seen before ; 
the era of 'private judgment,' as they call it. 
By this revolt against the Pope, every man 
became his own Pope; and learnt, among other 
things, that he must never trust any Pope, or 
spiritual Hero-captain, any more ! Whereby, 
is not spiritual union, all hierarchy and sub- 
ordination among men, henceforth an impossi- 



174 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

bility? So we hear it said — Now I need not 
deny that Protestantism was a revolt against 
spiritual sovereignties, Popes and much else. 
Nay I will grant that English Puritanism, 
revolt against earthly sovereignties, was the 
second act of it; that the enormous French 
Revolution itself was the third act, whereby 
all sovereignties earthly and spiritual were, as 
might seem, abolished or made sure of aboli- 
tion. Protestantism is the grand root from 
which our whole subsequent European History 
branches out. For the spiritual will always 
body itself forth in the temporal history of 
men; the spiritual is the beginning of the 
temporal. And now, sure enough, the cry is 
everywhere for Libert} 7 and Equality, Inde- 
pendence and so forth ; instead of Kings, Ballot- 
boxes and Electoral suffrages: it seems made 
out that any Hero-sovereign, or loyal obedience 
of men to a man, in things temporal, or things 
spiritual, has passed away forever from the 
world. I should despair of the world alto- 
gether, if so. One of my deepest convictions 
is, that it is not so. Without sovereigns, true 
sovereigns, temporal and spiritual, I see noth- 
ing possible but an anarchy; the hatefulest of 
things. But 1 find Protestantism, whatever 
anarchic democracy it have produced, to be the 
beginning of new genuine sovereignty and 
order. I find . it to be a revolt against false 
sovereigns; the painful but indispensible first 
preparative for true sovereigns getting place 
among us! This is worth explaining a little. 
Let us remark, therefore, in the first place, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 175 

that this of 'private judgment' is, at bottom, 
not a new thing in the world, but only new at 
that epoch of the world. There is nothing 
generically new or peculiar in the Reforma- 
tion ; it was a return to Truth and Reality in 
opposition to Falsehood and Semblance, as all 
kinds of Improvement and genuine Teaching 
are and have been. Liberty of private judg- 
ment, if we will consider it, must at all times 
have existed in the world. Dante had not put 
out his eyes, or tied shackles on himself; he 
was at home in that Catholicism of his, a free- 
seeing soul in it, — if many a poor Hogstraten. 
Tetzel and Dr. Eck had now become slaves in 
its Liberty of judgment? No iron chain, or 
outward force of any kind, could ever compel 
the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve : 
it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment 
of his; he will reign, and believe there, by the 
grace of God alone ! The sorriest sophistical 
Bellarmine, preaching sightless faith and 
passive obedience, must first, by some kind of 
conviction, have abdicated his right to be con- 
vinced. His 'private judgment' indicated that, 
as the advisablest step he could take. The 
right of private judgment will subsist, in full 
force, wherever true men subsist. A true 
man believes with his whole judgment, with 
all the illumination and discernment that is in 
him, and has always so believed. A false 
man, only struggling to 'believe that he 
believes,' will naturally manage it in some 
other way. Protestantism said to this letter, 
Woe! and to the former, Well done! At bot- 



176 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

torn, it was no new saying; it was a return to 
all old sayings that ever had been said. Be 
genuine, be sincere: that was, once more, the 
meaning of it. Mahomet believed with his 
whole mind; Odin with his whole mind, — he, 
and all true Followers of Odinism. They, by 
their private judgment, had 'judged,' — so. 

And now I venture to assert, that the exer- 
cise of private judgment, faithfully gone about, 
does by no means necessarily end in selfish 
independence, isolation; but rather ends 
necessarily in the opposite of that. It is not 
honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is 
error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that 
make it. A man protesting against error is on 
the way toward uniting himself with all men 
that believe in truth. There is no communion 
possible among men who believe only in hear- 
says. The heart of each is lying dead; has no 
power of sympathy even with things, — or he 
would believe them and not hearsays. No 
sympathy even with things; how much less 
with his fellow-men! He cannot unite with 
men ; he is an anarchic man. Only in a world 
of sincere men is unity possible : — and there, 
in the long run, it is as good as certain. 

For observe one thing, a thing too often left 
out of view, or rather altogether lost sight of, 
in this controversy : That it is not necessary a 
man should himself have discovered the truth 
he is to believe in, and never so sincerely to 
believe in. A Great Man, we said, was 
always sincere, as the first condition of him. 
But a man need not be great in order to be 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 177 

sincere; that is not the necessity of Nature 
and all Time, but only of certain corrupt un- 
fortunate epochs of Time. A mancan believe, 
and make his own, in the most genuine way, 
what he has received from another; — and with 
boundless gratitude to that other! The merit 
of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. 
The believing man is the original man ; what- 
soever he believes, he believes it for himself, 
not for another. Every son of Adam can 
become a sincere man, an original man, in this 
sense; no mortal is doomed to be an insincere 
man. Whole ages, what we call ages of Faith, 
are original ; all men in them, or the most of 
men in them, sincere. These are the great and 
fruitful ages; every worker, in all spheres, is 
a worker not on semblance but on substance; 
every work issues in a result : the general sum 
of such work is great; for all of it, as genuine, 
tends toward one goal ; all of it is additive, 
none of it subtractive. There is true union, 
true kingship, loyalty, all true and 'blessed 
things, so far as the poor Earth can produce 
blessedness for men. 

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self- 
subsistent, original, true, or what we call it, 
is surely the farthest in the world from indis- 
posing him to reverence and believe other 
men's truth ! It only disposes, necessitates and 
invincibly compels him to disbelieve other 
men's dead formulas, hearsays and untruths. 
A man embraces truth with his eyes open, and 
because his eyes are open: does he need to 
shut them before he can love his Teacher of 

12 



178 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

truth? He alone can love, with a right grati- 
tude and genuine loyalty of soul, the Hero- 
Teacher who has delivered him out of dark- 
ness into light. Is not such a one a true Hero 
and Serpen t-queller; worthy of all reverence! 
The black monster, Falsehood, our one enemy 
in this world, lies prostrate by his valor; it 
was he that conquered the world for us! — See, 
accordingly, was not Luther himself rever- 
enced as a true Pope, or Spiritual Father, 
being verily such? Napoleon, from amid 
boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a 
King. Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. 
Loyalty and Sovereignty are everlasting in 
the world : — and there is this in them, that they 
are grounded not on garnitures and sem- 
blances, but on realities and sincerities. Not 
by shutting your eyes, your 'private judg- 
ment ;'• no, but by opening them, and by hav- 
ing something to see! Luther's message was 
deposition and abolition to all false Popes 
and Potentates, but life and strength, though 
afar off, to new genuine ones. 

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral 
suffrages, Independence and so forth, we will 
take, therefore, to be a temporary phenom- 
enon, by no means a final one. Though likely 
to last a long time, with sad enough embroil- 
ments for us all, we must welcome it, as the 
penalty of sins that are past, the pledge of in- 
estimable benefits that are coming. In all 
ways, it behoved men to quit simulacra and 
return to fact; cost what it might, that did 
behove to be done. With spurious Popes, and 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 179 

Believers having no private judgment, — quacks 
pretending to command over dupes,— t- what 
can you do? Misery and mischief only. You 
cannot make an association out of insincere 
men; you cannot build an edifice except by 
plummet and level, — at right-angles to one 
another. In all this wild revolutionary work, 
from Protestantism downward, I see the bless- 
edest result preparing itself: not abolition of 
Hero-worship, but rather what I would call a 
whole World of Heroes. If Hero means sin- 
cere man, why may not every one of us be a 
Hero? A world all sincere, a believing world: 
the like has been; the like will again be, — 
cannot help being. That were the right sort 
of Worshipers for Heroes: never could the 
truly Better be so reverenced as where all 
were True and Good! — But we must hasten to 
Luther and his Life. 

Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxon}^; 
he came into the world there on the ioth of 
November, 1483. It was an accident that 
gave this honor to Eisleben. His parents, 
poor mine-laborers in a village of that region, 
named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben Win- 
ter-Fair: in the tumult of this scene the Frau 
Luther was taken with travail, found refuge 
in some poor house there, and the boy she bore 
was named Martin Luther. Strange enough 
to reflect upon it, this poor Frau Luther, 
she had gone with her husband to make her 
small merchandisings ; perhaps to sell the lock 
of yarn she had been spinning, to buy the 
small winter-necessaries for her narrow hut 



180 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

or household; in the whole world, that day, 
there was not a more entirely unimportant 
looking pair of people than this Miner and his 
Wife. And yet what were all Emperors, 
Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There 
was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; 
whose light was to flame as the beacon -over 
long centuries and epochs of the world; the 
whole world and its history was waiting for 
this man. It is strange, it is great. It leads 
us back to another Birth-hour, in a 'still 
meaner environment, Eighteen Hundred years 
ago, — of which it is fit that we say nothing, 
that we think only in silence ; for what words 
are there! The Age of Miracles past? The 
Age of Miracles is forever here! — 

I find it altogether suitable to Luther's func- 
tion in this Earth, and doubtless wisely ordered 
to that end by the Providence presiding over 
him and us and all things, that he was born 
poor, and brought up poor, one of the poorest 
of men. He had to beg, as the school-children 
in those times did; singing for alms and 
bread, from door to door. Hardship, rigorous 
Necessity was the poor boy's companion ; no 
man nor no thing would put-on a false face to 
flatter Martin Luther. Among things, not 
among the shows of things, had he to grow. 
A boy of rude figure, yet with weak health, 
with his large greedy soul, full of all faculty 
and sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it 
was his task to get acquainted with realities, 
and keep acquainted with them, at whatever 
cost: his task was to bring the whole world 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 181 

back to reality, for it had dwelt too long with 
semblance! A youth nursed-up in wintry 
whirlwinds, in desolate darkness and diffi- 
culty, that he may step forth at last from his 
stormy Scandinavia, strong as a true man, as 
a god: a Christian Odin, — a right Thor once 
more, with his thunder-hammer, to smite asun- 
der ugly enough Jotuns and Giant-monsters! 

Perhaps the turning incident of his life, we 
may fancy, was that death of his friend Alexis, 
by lightning, at the gate of Erfurt. Luther 
had struggled-up through boyhood, better and 
worse; displaying, in spite of all hindrances, 
the largest intellect, eager to learn : his father 
judging doubtless that he might promote 
himself in the world, set him upon the study 
of Law. This was the path to rise ; Luther, 
with little will in it either way, had con- 
sented: he was now nineteen years of age. 
Alexis and he had been to see the old Luther 
people at Mansfeldt; were got back again 
near Erfurt, when a thunderstorm came on; 
the bolt struck Alexis, he fell dead at Luther's 
feet. What is this Life of ours? — gone in a 
moment, burnt-up like a scroll, into the blank 
Eternity! What are all earthly preferments, 
Chancelorships, Kingships? They lie shrunk 
together — there! The Earth has opened on 
them; in a moment they are not, and Eternity 
is. Luther, struck to the heart, determined 
to devote himself to God and God's service 
alone. In spite of all dissuasions from his 
father and others, he became a Monk in the 
Augustine Convent at Erfurt. 



182 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

This was probably the first light- point in the 
history of Luther, his purer will now first 
decisively uttering itself; but, for the present 
it was still as one light-point in an element 
all of darkness. He says he was a pious 
monk, ich bin ein frommer Monch gewesen; faith- 
fully, painfully struggling to work-out the 
truth of this high act of his ; but it was to 
little purpose. His misery had not lessened; 
had rather, as it were, increased into infini- 
tude. The drudgeries he had to do, as novice 
in his Convent, all sorts ot slave-work, were 
not his grievance: the deep earnest soul of the 
man had fallen into all manner of black 
scruples, dubitations; he believed himself 
likely to die soon, and far worse than die. 
One hears with a new interest for poor Luther 
that, at this time, he lived in terror of the 
unspeakable misery; fancied that he was 
doomed to eternal reprobation. "Was it not 
the humble sincere nature of the man? What 
was he, that he should be raised to Heaven! 
He that had known only misery, and mean 
slavery: the news was too blessed to be 
credible. It could not become clear to him 
now, by fasts, vigils, formalities and mass- 
work, a man's soul could be saved. He fell 
into the blackest wretchedness; had to wander 
staggering as on the verge of bottomless De- 
spair. 

It must have been a most blessed discovery, 
that of an old Latin Bible which he found in 
the Erfert Library about this time. He had 
never seen the Book before. It taueht him 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 183 

another lesson than that of fasts and vigils. 
A brother monk too, of pious experience, was 
helpful. Luther learned now that a man 
was saved not by singing masses, but by the 
infinite grace of God : a more creditable 
hypothesis. He gradually got himself founded, 
as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate 
the Bible, which had brought this blessed help 
to him. He prized it as the Word of the High- 
est must be prized by such a man. He deter- 
mined to hold by that; as through life and to 
death he firmly did. 

This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, 
his final triumph over darkness, what we call 
his conversion; for himself the most impor- 
tant of all epochs. That he should now grow 
daily in peace and clearness; that, unfolding 
now the great, talents and virtues implanted 
in him, he should rise to importance in his 
Convent, in his country and be found more 
and more useful in all honest business of life, 
is a natural result. He was sent on missions 
by his Augustine Order, as a man of talent and 
fidelity fit to do their business well : the Elector 
of vSaxony, Friedrich, named the Wise, a truly 
wise and just prince, had cast his eye on him 
as a valuable person; made him Professor in 
his new University of Wittenberg, Preacher 
too at Wittenberg; in both which capacities, as 
in all duties he did, this Luther, in the peace- 
able sphere of common life, was gaining more 
and more esteem with all good men. 

It was in his twenty-seventh year that he 
first saw Rome ; being sent thither, as I said, 



184 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

on mission from his Convent. Pope Julius the 
Second, and what was going-on at Rome, 
must have filled the mind of Luther with 
amazement. He had come as to the Sacred 
City, throne of God's Highpriest on Earth; 
and he found it — what we know! Many 
thoughts it must have given the man ; many 
which we have no record of, which perhaps he 
did not himself know how to utter. This 
Rome, this scene of false priests, clothed not 
in the beauty of holiness, but in far other 
vesture, is false: but what is it to Luther? A 
mean man he, how shall he reform a world? 
That was far from his thoughts. A humble, 
solitary man, why should he at all meddle with 
the world? It was the task of quite higher 
men than He. His business was to guide his 
own footsteps wisely through the world. Let 
him do his own obscure duty in it well; the 
rest, horrible and dismal as it looks, is in God's 
hand, not in his. 

It is curious to reflect what might have been 
the issue, had Roman Popery happened to 
pass this Luther by ; to go on in its great waste- 
ful orbit, and not come athwart his little path, 
and force him to assault it! Conceivable 
enough that, in this case, he might have held 
his peace about the abuses of Rome ; left Prov- 
idence and God on high, to deal with them! 
A modest quiet man ; not prompt he to attack 
irreverently persons in authority. His clear 
task, as I say, was to do his own duty; to 
walk wisely in this world of confused wicked- 
ness, and save his own soul alive. But the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 185 

Roman Highpriesthood did come athwart him: 
afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not 
livd in honesty for it; he remonstrated, 
resisted, came to extremity; was struck at, 
struck again, and so it came to wager of battle 
between them! This is worth attending to in 
Luther's history. Perhaps no man of so hum- 
ble, peaceable a disposition ever filled the 
world with contention. We cannot but see 
that he would have loved privacy, quiet dili- 
gence in the shade ; that it was against his 
will he ever became a notoriety. Notoriety: 
what would that do for him? The goal of his 
march through this world was the Infinite 
Heaven ; an indubitable goal for him ; in a few 
years, he should either have attained that, or 
lost it forever! We will say nothing at all, I 
think, of that sorrowfulest of theories, of its 
being some mean shopkeeper grudge, of the 
Augustine Monk against the Dominican, that 
first kindled the wrath of Luther, and produced 
the Protestant Reformation. We will say to 
the people who maintain it, if indeed any such 
exist now: Get first into the sphere of thought 
by which it is so much as possible to judge of 
Luther, or of any man like Luther, otherwise 
than distractedly; we may then begin arguing 
with you. 

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the 
way of trade, by Leo Tenth, —who merely 
wanted to raise a little money, and for the rest 
seems to have been a Pagan rather than a 
Christian, so far as he was anything, — arrived 
at Wittenberg, and drove his scandalous trade 



186 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

there. Luther's flock brought Indulgences; 
in the confessional of his Church, people 
pleaded to him that they had already got their 
sins pardoned. Luther, if he would not be 1 
found wanting at his own post, a false slug- 
gard and coward at the very center of the little, 
space of ground that was his own and no other 
man's, had to step-forth against Indulgences, 
and declare aloud that they were a futility and 
sorrowful mockery, that no man's sins could 
be pardoned by them. It was the beginning 
of the whole Reformation. We know how it 
went; forward from this first public challenge 
of Tetzel, on the last day of October 15 17, 
through remonstrance and argument; — spread- 
ing ever wider, rising ever higher; till it 
became unquenchable, and enveloped all the 
world. Luther's heart's-desire was to have 
this grief and other griefs amended; his 
thought was still far other than that of intro- 
ducing separation in the Church, or revolting 
against the Pope, Father of Christendom. — ■ 
The elegant Pagan Pope cared little about this 
Monk and his doctrines; wished, however, to 
have done with the noise of him : in a space of 
some three years, having tried various softer 
methods, he thought good to end it by fire. 
He dooms the Monk's writings to burnt by the 
hangman, and his body to be sent bound to 
Rome, — probably for a similar purpose. It 
was the way they had ended with Huss, with 
Jerome, the century before. A short argu- 
ment, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that Con- 
stance Council, with all imaginable promises 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 187 

md safe-conducts; an earnest, not rebellious 
;:dnd of man: they laid him instantly in a 
; stone dungeon 'three-feet wide, six-feet high, 
. : >even-feet long;' burnt the true voice of him 
jphit of this world ; choked it in smoke and fire. 
That was not well done ! 

I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether 
revolting against the Pope. The elegant 
tPagan, by this fire-decree of his, had kindled 
nto noble just wrath the bravest heart then 
Hiving in this world. The bravest, if also one 
}f the humblest, peaceablest; it was now kin- 
dled. These words of mine, words of truth 
and soberness, aiming faithfully, as human 
inability would allow, to promote God's truth 
<on Earth, and save men's souls, you, God's 
vicegerent on earth, answer them by the hang- 
man and fire? You will burn me and them, 
for answer to the God's-message they strove to 
bring you? You are not God's vicegerent; 
you are another's than his, I think! I take 
your Bull, as an emparchmented Lie, and burn 
it. You will do what you see good next: this 
is what I do. — It was on the ioth of December, 
1520, three years after the beginning of the 
business, that Luther, 'with a great concourse 
oof people,' took this indignant step of burn- 
ing the Pope's fire-decree 'at the Elster-Gate 
:of Wittenberg.' Wittenberg looked on 'with 
shoutings;' the whole world was looking on. 
The Pope should not have provoked that 
'shout. ' It was the shout of the awakening 
of nations. The quiet German heart, modest, 
patient of much, had at length got more than 



188 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

it could bear, Formulism, Pagan Popeism, and 
other Falsehood and corrupt Semblance had 
ruled long enough ; and here once more was a 
man found who durst tell all men that God's- 
world stood not on semblances, but on reali- 
ties ; that Life was a truth, and not a lie ! 

At bottom, as was said above, we are to con- 
sider Luther as a Prophet Idol-breaker; a 
bringer-back of men to reality. It is the func- 
tion of great men and teachers. Mahomet 
said, These idols of yours are wood ; you put 
wax and oil on them, the flies stick on them ; 
they are not God, I tell you, they are black 
wood! Luther said to the Pope, This thing of 
yours that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is a bit 
of rag-paper with ink. It is nothing else ; it, 
and so much like it, is nothing else. God 
alone can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritual 
Fatherhood of God's Church, is that a vain 
semblance, of cloth and parchment? It is an 
awful fact. God's Church is not a semblance, 
Heaven and Hell are not semblances. I stand 
on this, since you drive me to it. Standing on 
this, I, a poor German Monk, am stronger than 
you all. I stand solitary, friendless, but on 
God's Truth; you with your tiaras, triple- 
hats, with your treasuries and armories, thun- 
ders spiritual and temporal, stand on the Dev- 
il's Lie, and are not so strong! — 

The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance 
there on the 17th of April, 15 21, may be con- 
sidered as the greatest scene in Modern Euro- 
pean History; the point, indeed, from which 
the whole subsequent history of civilization 







LECTURES ON HEROES. 189 

5 takes its rise, After multiplied negotiations, 
[ disputations, it had come to this. The young 
B Emperor Charles Fifth, with all the Princes of 
. Germany, Papal nuncios, dignitaries, spiritual 
. and temporal, are assembled there; Luther is 
to appear and answer for himself, whether he 
. will recant or not. The world's pomp and 
n power sits there on this hand ; on that, stands 
. up for God's Truth, one man, the poor miner 
j Hans Luther's Son. Friends had reminded 
jhim of Huss, advised him not to go; he would 
■mot be advised. A large company of friends 
; rode-out to meet him, with still more earnest 
\\ warnings; he answered, "Were there as many 
/Devils in Worms as there are roof- tiles, I 
would on." The people, on the morrow, as 
| he went to the Hall of the Diet, crowded the 
I windows and housetops, some of them calling 
i out to him, in solemn words, not to recant: 
/'Whosoever denieth me before men!" they 
cried to him, — as in a kind of solemn petition 
and adjuration. Was it not in reality our pe- 
tition, too, the petition of the whole world, 
jlying in dark bondage of soul, paralyzed under 
a black spectral Nightmare and triple-hatted 
IChimera calling itself Father in God, and what 
not: "Free us; it rests with thee; desert us 
not!" 

Luther did not desert us. His speech, of 
:two hours, distinguished itself by its respect- 
ful, wise and honest tone ; submissive to what- 
soever could lawfully claim submission, not 
submissive to any more than that. His writ- 
ings, he said, were partly his own, party de- 



190 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

rived from the Word of God. As to what was 
his own, human infirmity entered into it; un- 
guarded anger, blindness, many things doubt- 
less which it were a blessing for him could he 
abolish altogether. But as to what stood on 
sound truth and the Word of God, he could not 
recant it. How could he? "Confute me," he 
concluded, "by proofs of Scripture, or else by 
plain just arguments: I cannot recant other- 
wise. For it is neither safe nor prudent to do 
aught against conscience. Here stand I; I can 
do no other: God assist me!" — It is, as we say, 
the greatest moment in the Modern History of 
Men, English Puritanism, England and its 
Parliaments, Americas, and vast work these 
two centuries ; French Revolution, Europe and 
its work everywhere at present ; the germ of it 
all lay there : had Luther in that moment done 
other, it had all been otherwise! The Euro- 
pean World was asking him : Am I to sink 
everlower into falsehood, stagnant putrescence, 
loathsome accursed death; or, with whatever 
paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods out of me, 
and be cured and live? — 

Great wars, contentions and disunion fol- 
lowed out of this Reformation; which last 
down to our day, and are yet far from ended. 
Great talk and crimination has been made 
about these. They are lamentable, undeni- 
able, but after all, what has Luther or his 
cause to do with them? It seems strange rea- 
soning to charge the Reformation with all this. 
When Hercules turned the purifying river into 
King Augeas' stables, I have no doubt the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 191 

•confusion that resulted was considerable all 
around ; but I think it was not Hercules' blame ; 
it was some other's blame! The Reformation 
might bring what results it liked when it came, 
but the Reformation simply could not help 
coming. To all Popes and Popes' advocates, 
expostulating, lamenting and accusing, the 
answer of the world is: Once for all, your 
Popehood has become untrue. No matter how 
good it was, how good you say it is, we cannot 
believe it; the light of our whole mind, given 
us to walk by from Heaven above, finds it 
henceforth a thing unbelievable. We will not 
believe it, we will not try to believe it, — we 
dare not ! The thing is untrue : we were trait- 
ors against the Giver of all Truth, if we durst 
pretend to think it true. Away with it; let 
whatsoever likes come in the place of it ; with 
it we can have no farther trade ! — Luther and 
liis Protestantism is not responsible for wars; 
the false Simulacra that forced him to protest, 
they are responsible. Luther did what every 
man that God has made has not only the right, 
but lies under the sacred duty, to do ; answered 
a Falsehood when it questioned him, Dost 
thou believe me? — No! — At what cost soever, 
without counting of costs, this thing behoved 
to be done. Union, organization, spiritual and 
material, a far nobler than any Popedom or 
Feudalism in their truest days, I never doubt, 
is coming for the world : sure to come. But 
on Fact alone, not on Semblance and Simula- 
crum, will it be able either to come, or to 
stand when come. With union grounded on 



192 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act 
lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? 
A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome 
grave is peaceable. We hope for a living 
peace, not a dead one! 

And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable 
blessings of the New, let us not be unjust to 
the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is. 
In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self- 
blinding or other dishonesty, to get itself reck- 
oned true. It was good then ; nay, there is in 
the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of 
'No Popery* is foolish enough in these days. 
The speculation that Popery is on the increase, 
building new chapels and so forth, may pass 
for one of the idlest ever started. Very curi- 
ous ; to count up a few Popish chapels, listen to 
a few Protestant logic choppings, — to much 
dull-droning drowsy inanity that still calls it- 
self Protestant, and say, See, Protestantism is 
dead; Popeism is more alive than it, will be 
alive after it! — Drowsy inanities, not a few, 
that call themselves Protestant are dead ; but 
Protestantism has not died yet, that I hear of! 
Protestantism, if we will look, has in these 
days produced its Goethe, its Napoleon; Ger- 
man Literature and the French Revolution; 
rather considerable signs of life! Nay, at bot- 
tom, what else is alive but Protestantism? The 
life of most else that one meets in a galvanic 
one merely, — not a pleasant, not a lasting sort 
of life! 

Popery can build new chapels ; welcome to 
do so, to all lengths. Popery cannot come 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 193 

back, any more than Paganism can, — which 
also still lingers in some countries. But, in- 
deed, it is with these things, as With the ebb- 
ing of the sea; you look at the waves oscillat- 
ing hither, thither on the beach ; for minutes 
you cannot tell how it is going; look in half an 
hour where it is, — look in half a century where 
your Popehood is ! Alas, would there were no 
greater danger to our Europe than the poor 
old Pope's revival! Thor may as soon try to 
revive. — And withal this oscillation has a 
meaning. The poor old Popehood will not die 
away entirely, as Thor has done, for some time 
yet; nor ought it. We may say, the Old never 
dies till this happen, Till all the soul of good 
that was in it have got itself transfused into 
the practical New. While a good work re- 
mains capable of being done by the Romish 
form ; or, what is inclusive of all, while a pious 
life remains capable of being led by it, just so 
long, if we consider, will this or the other hu- 
man soul adopt it, go about as a living witness 
of it. So long it will obtrude itself on the eye 
of us who reject it, till we in our practice too 
have appropriated whatsoever of truth was in 
it. Then, but also not till then, it will have no 
charm more for any man. It lasts here for a 
purpose. Let it last as long as it can. — 

Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all 
these wars and bloodshed, the noticeable fact 
that none of them began so long as he con- 
tinued living. The controversy did not get to 
fighting so long as he was there. To me it is 
proof of his greatness in all senses, this fact. 

13 Heroes 



194 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

How seldom do we find a man that has stirred 
up some vast commotion, who does not himself 
perish, swept away in it ! Such is the usual 
course of revolutionists. Luther continued, in 
a good degree, sovereign of this greatest revo- 
lution ; all Protestants, of what rank or func- 
tion soever, looking much to him for guidance ; 
and he held it peaceable, continued firm at the 
center of it. A man to do this must have a 
kingly faculty ; he must have the gift to dis- 
cern at all turns where the true heart of the 
matter lies, and to plant himself courageously 
on that, as a strong true man, that other true 
men may rally round him there. He will not 
continue leader of men otherwise. Luther's 
clear deep force of judgment, his force of all 
sorts, of silence, of tolerance and moderation, 
among others, are very notable in these cir- 
cumstances. 

Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind of tol- 
erance ; he distinguishes what is essential, and 
what is not ; the unessential may go very much 
as it will. A complaint comes to him that such 
and such a Reformed Preacher 'will not 
preach without a cassock. ' Well, answers 
Luther, what harm will a cassock do the man? 
'Let him have a cassock to preach in; let him 
have three cassocks if he find benefit in them!' 
His conduct in the matter of Karlstadt's wild 
image breaking; of the Anabaptists; of the 
Peasants' War, shows a noble strength, very 
different from spasmodic violence. With sure 
prompt insight he discriminates what is what ; 
a strong just man, he speaks forth what is the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 195 

wise course, and all men follow him in that. 
Luther's Written Works give similar testimony 
of him. The dialect of these speculations is 
now grown obsolete for us ; hut one still reads 
them with a singular attraction. And, indeed, 
the mere grammatical diction is still legible 
enough; Luther's merit in literary history is 
of the greatest; his dialect became the lan- 
guage of all writing. They are not well writ- 
ten, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; 
written hastily, with quite other than literary 
objects. But in no Books have I found a more 
robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a 
man than in these. A rugged honesty, home- 
liness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and 
strength. He flashes out illumination from 
him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to 
cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good 
humor, too, nay, tender affection, nobleness, 
and depth : this man could have been a Poet, 
too ! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write 
one. I call him a great Thinker; as, indeed, 
his greatness of heart already betokens that. 

Richter says of Luther's words, 'his words 
are half-battles.' They may be called so. 
The essential quality of him was, that he could 
fight and conquer; that he was a right piece of 
human Valor. No more valiant man, no mor- 
tal heart to be called braver, that one has rec- 
ord of, ever lived in that Teutonic Kindred, 
whose character is valor. His defiance of the 
'Devils' in Worms was not a mere boast, as 
the like might be if now spoken. It was a 
faith of Luther's that there were Devils, spir- 



196 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

itual denizens of the Pit, continually besetting 
men. Many times, in his writings, this turns 
up; and a most small sneer has been grounded 
on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg, 
where he sat translating the Bible, they still 
show you a black spot on the wall; the strange 
memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sat 
translating one of the Psalms ; he was worn- 
down with long labor, with sickness, abstinence 
from food ; there rose before him some hideous 
indefinable Image, which he took for the Evil 
One, to forbid his work; Luther started up, 
with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the 
specter, and it disappeared ! The spot still re- 
mains there ; a curious monument of several 
things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now 
tell us what we are to think of this apparition, 
in a scientific sense; but the man's heart that 
dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell 
itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness. 
The thing he will quail before exists not on 
this Earth or under it. — Fearless enough! 
'The Devil is aware,' writes he on one occa- 
sion, 'that this does not proceed out of fear in 
me. I have seen and defied innumerable 
Devils. Duke George,' of Leipzig, a great 
enemy of his, 'Duke George is not equal to 
one Devil,' — far short of a Devil! 'If I had 
business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, 
though it rained Duke-Georges for nine days 
running. ' What a reservoir of Dukes to ride 
into! — 

At the same time, they err greatly who im- 
agine that this man's courage was ferocity, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 197 

mere coarse disobedient obstinacy and savag- 
ery, as many do. Far from that. There may 
be an absence of fear which arises from the 
absence of thought or affection, from the pres- 
ence of hatred and stupid fury. We do not 
value the courage of the tiger highly ! With 
Lmther it was far otherwise; no accusation 
could be more unjust than this of mere fero- 
cious violence brought against him. A most 
gentle heart withal, full of pity and love, as, 
indeed, the truly valiant heart ever is. The 
tiger before a stronger foe — flies ; the tiger is 
not what we call valiant, only fierce and cruel. 
I know few things more touching than those 
soft breathings of affection, soft as a child's 
or a mother's, in this great wild heart of 
Luther. So honest, unadulterated with any 
cant ; homely, rude in their utterance ; pure as 
water welling from the rock. What, in fact, 
was all that downpressed mood of despair and 
reprobation which we saw in his youth, but 
the outcome of pre-eminent thoughtful gentle- 
ness, affections too keen and fine? It is the 
course such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall 
into. Luther to a slight observer might have 
seemed a timid, weak man ; modesty, affection- 
ate shrinking tenderness the chief distinction of 
him. It is a noble valor which is roused in a 
heart like this, once stirred up into defiance, 
all kindled into a heavenly blaze. 

In Luther's Table Talk, a posthumous Book 
of anecdotes and sayings collected by his 
friends, the most interesting now of all the 
Books proceeding from him, we have many 



198 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

beautiful unconscious displays of the man, 
and what sort of nature he had. His behavior 
at the deathbed of his little Daughter, so still, 
so great and loving, is among the most affect- 
ing things. He is resigned that his little Mag- 
dalene should die, yet longs inexpressibly that 
she might live ; — follows, in awe-struck thought, 
the flight of her little soul through those un- 
known realms. Awestruck; most heartfelt, 
we can see; and sincere. — for after all dogmatic 
creeds and articles, he feels what nothing it is 
that we know, or can know. His little Mag- 
dalene shall be with God, as God wills; for 
Luther too that is all ; Islam is all. 

Once, he looks out from his solitary Patmos, 
the Castle of Coburg, in the middle of the 
night: The great vault of Immensity, long 
flights of clouds sailing through it, — dumb, 
gaunt, huge; — who supports all that? "None 
ever saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported." 
God supports it. We must know that God is 
great, that God is good ; and trust, where we 
cannot see. — Returning home from Leipzig 
once, he is struck by the beauty of the harvest 
fields : How it stands, that golden yellow corn, 
on its fair taper stem, its golden head bent, 
all rich and waving there, — the meek Earth, 
at God's kind bidding, has produced it once 
again; the bread of man! — In the garden at 
Wittenberg one evening at sunset, a little bird 
has perched for the night: That little bird, says 
Luther, above it are the stars and deep Heaven 
of worlds; yet it has folded its little wings; 
gone trustfully to rest there as in its home ; 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 199 

the Maker of it has given it too a home ! — 
Neither are mirthful turns wanting; there is a 
great free human heart in this man. The com- 
mon speech of him has a rugged nobleness, 
idiomatic, expressive, genuine; gleams here 
and there with beautiful poetic tints. One 
feels him to be a great brother man. His love 
of Music, indeed, is not this, as it were, the 
summary of all these affections in him? Many 
a wild unutterability he spoke forth from him 
in the tones of his flute. The Devils fled from 
his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one 
hand, and such love of music on the other ; I 
could call these the two opposite poles of a 
great soul ; between these two all great things 
had room. 

Luther's face is to me expressive of him; in 
Kranach's best portraits I find the true Luther. 
A rude plebeian face ; with it huge crag-like 
brows and ones, the emblem of rugged energy ; 
at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in the 
eyes especially there is a wild silent sorrow ; 
an unnamable melancholy, the element of all 
gentle and fine affections ; giving to the rest 
the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter was 
in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were 
there. Tears also were appointed him ; tears 
and hard toil. The basis of his life was Sad- 
ness, Earnestness. In his latter days, after all 
triumphs and victories, he expresses himself 
heartily weary of living ; he considers that God 
alone can and will regulate the course things 
are taking, and that perhaps the Day of Judg- 
ment is not far. As for him, he longs for one 



200 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

thing : that God would release him from his 
labor, and let him depart and be at rest. They 
understand little of the man who cites this in 
discredit of him ! — I will call this Luther a true 
Great Man; great in intellect, in courage, 
affection and integrity; one of our most lov- 
able and precious men. Great, not as a hewn 
obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain, — so sim- 
ple, honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be 
great at all ; there for quite another purpose 
than being great! Ah, yes, unsubduable gran- 
ite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens; 
yet in the clefts of it fountains, green beauti- 
ful valley with flowers! A right Spiritual 
Hero and Prophet; once more, a true Son of 
Nature and Fact, for whom these centuries, 
and many that are to come yet, will be thank- 
ful to Heaven. 

The most interesting phasis which the Ref- 
ormation anywhere assumes, especially for us 
English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther's 
own country Protestantism soon dwindled into 
a rather barren affair ; not a religion or faith, 
but rather now a theological jangling of argu- 
ment, the proper seat of it not the heart ; the 
essence of it skeptical contention ; which indeed 
has jangled more and more, down to Voltaire- 
ism itself, — through Gustavus Adolphus con- 
tentions onward to French Revolution ones! 
But in our Island there arose a Puritanism 
which even got itself established as a Presby- 
terianism and National Church among the 
Scotch ; which came forth as a real business of 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 201 

the heart ; and has produced in the world very- 
notable fruit. In some senses, one may say it 
is the only phasis of Protestantism that ever 
got to the rank of being a Faith, a true heart- 
communication with Heaven, and of exhibiting 
itself in History as such. We must spare a 
few words for Knox ; himself a brave and re- 
markable man; but still more important as 
Chief Priest and Founder, which one may con- 
sider him to be, of the Faith that became Scot- 
land's, New England's, Oliver Cromwell's. 
History will have something to say about this, 
for some time to come ! 

We may censure Puritanism as we please ; 
and no one of us, I suppose, but would find it 
a very rough defective thing. But we, and all 
men, may understand that it was a genuine 
thing; for Nature has adopted it, and it has 
grown, and grows. I say sometimes, that all 
goes by wager-of-battle in this world; that 
strength, well understood, is the measure of 
all worth. (5ive a thing time ; if it can suc- 
ceed, it is a right thing. Look now at Ameri- 
can Saxondom ; and at that little Fact of the 
sailing of the Mayflower, two hundred years 
ago, from Delft Haven in Holland! Were we 
of open sense as the Greeks were, we had 
found a Poem here; one of Nature's own Po- 
ems, such as she writes in broad facts over 
great continents. For it was properly the 
beginning of America; there were straggling 
settlers in America before, some material as of 
a body was there ; but the soul of it was first 
this. These poor men, driven out of their own 

14 Heroes 



•202 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

country, not able well to live in Holland, de- 
termine on settling in the New World. Black 
untamed forests are there, and wild savage 
creatures; but not so cruel as Starchamber 
"hangmen. They thought the Earth would yield 
them food, if they tilled honestly ; the ever- 
lasting heaven would stretch there, too, over- 
head ; they should be left in peace, to prepare 
for Eternity by living well in this world of 
Time; worshiping in what they thought the 
true, not the idolatrous way. They clubbed 
their small means together; hired a ship, the 
little ship Mayflower, and made ready to set 
sail. 

In Neal's History of the Puritans* is an 
account of the ceremony of their departure: 
solemnity, we might call it rather, for it was a 
real act of worship. Their minister went down 
with them to the beach, and their brethren 
whom they were to leave behind ; all joined in 
solemn prayer, That God would have pity on 
His poor children, and go with them into that 
waste wilderness, for He also had made that, 
He was there also as well as here. — Hah! 
These men, I think, had a work! The weak 
thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong 
one day, if it be a true thing. Puritanism was 
only despicable, laughable then ; but nobody 
can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism 
has got weapons and sinews; it has fire-arms, 
war-navies; it has cunning in its ten fingers, 
strength in its right arm ; it can steer ships, 



*Neal (London, 1755;, i, 490. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 20$ 

fell forests, remove mountains; — it is one of 
the strongest things under this sun at present! 

In the history of Scotland, too, I can find 
properly but one epoch; we may say, it con- 
tains nothing of world-interest at all but this 
Reformation by Knox. A poor barren country, 
full of continual broils, dissensions, massacr- 
ings; a people in the last state of rudeness and 
destitution, little better perhaps than Ireland 
at this day. Hungry fierce barons, not so 
much as able to form any arrangement with 
each other how to divide what they fleeced 
from these poor drudges; but obliged, as the 
Columbian Republics are at this day, to make 
of every alteration a revolution; no way of 
changing a ministry but by hanging the old 
ministers on gibbets: this is a historical spec- 
tacle of no very singular significance: 'Brav- 
ery' enough, I doubt not; fierce fighting in 
abundance ; but not braver or fiercer than that 
of their old Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors; 
whose exploits we have not found worth dwell- 
ing on ! It is a country as yet v/ithout a soul ; 
nothing developed in it but what is rude, ex- 
ternal, semi-animal. And now at the Refor- 
mation, the internal life is kindled, as it were, 
under the ribs of this outward material death. 
A cause, the noblest of causes kindles itself, 
like a beacon set on high; high as Heaven, 
yet attainable from Earth ; whereby the mean- 
est man becomes not a Citizen only, but a 
Member of Christ's visible Church; a verit- 
able Hero, if he prove a true man! 

Well ; this is what I mean by a whole 'nation 



204 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

of heroes;' a believing nation. There needs 
not a great soul to make a hero ; there needs a 
God-created soul which will be true to its 
origin ; that will be a great soul ! The like has 
been seen we find. The like will be again 
seen, under wider forms than the Presbyterian: 
there can be no lasting good done till then. — 
Impossible! say some Possible? Has it not 
been, in this world, as a practiced fact? Did 
Hero-worship fail in Knox's case? Or are we 
made of other clay now? Did the Westmin- 
ster Confession of Faith add some new proper- 
ty to the soul of man? God made the soul of 
man. He did not doom any soul of man to 
live as a Hypothesis and Hearsay, in a world 
filled with such, and with the fatal work and 
fruit of such ! 

But to return : This that Knox did for his 
Nation, I say, we may really call a resurrec- 
tion as from death. It was not a smooth busi- 
ness; but it was welcome surely, and cheap at 
that price, had it been far rougher. On the 
whole, cheap at any price, — as life is. The 
people began to live: they needed first of all to 
do that, at what cost and costs soever. Scotch 
Literature and Thought, Scotch Industry; 
James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert 
Burns: I find Knox and the Reformation act- 
ing in the heart's core of every one of the per- 
sons and phenomena; I find that without the 
Reformation they would not have been. Or 
what of Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland 
became that of England, of New England. A 
tumult in the High Church of Edinburgh 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 205 

spread into a universal battle and struggle 
over all these realms; — there came out, after 
fifty years struggling, what we all call the 'Glo- 
rious Revolution,' a Habeas-Corpus Act, Free 
Parliaments, and much else ! — Alas, is it not too 
true what we said, that many men in the van, 
do always, like Russian soldiers, march into 
the ditch of Schweidnitz, and fill it up with 
their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over 
them dry-shod, and gain the honor? How 
many earnest rugged Cromwells, Knoxes, poor 
Peasant Covenanters, wrestling, battling for 
very life, in rough, miry places, have to strug- 
gle, and suffer, and fall, greatly censured, 
bemired, — before a beautiful Revolution of 
Eighty-eight can step-over them in official 
pumps and silk-stockings, with universal three- 
times- three! 

It seems to me hard measure that this Scot- 
tish man, now after three-hundred years, 
should have been plead like a culprit before 
the world; intrinsically for having been, in 
such a way as it was then possible to be, the 
bravest of all Scotchmen ! Had he been a poor 
Half-and-half, he could have crouched into the 
corner, like so many others ; Scotland had not 
been delivered; and Knox had been without 
blame. He is the one Scotchman to whom of 
all others, his country and the world owe 
a debt. He has to pled that Scotland would 
forgive him for having been worth to it any 
million 'unblamable' Scotchmen that need no 
forgiveness! He bared his breast to the 
battle; had to row in French galleys, wander 



206 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

forlorn in exile, in clouds and storms ; was cen- 
sured, shot at through his windows; had a right 
sore fighting life : if this world were his place 
of recompense, he had made but a bad venture 
of it. I cannot apologize for Knox. To him it 
is very indifferent, these two-hundred-and-fifty 
years or more, what men say of him. But we, 
having got above all those details of his battle, 
and living now in clearness, on the fruits of 
his victory, we, for our own sake, ought to 
look through the rumors and controversies 
enveloping the man into the man himself. 

For one thing, I will remark that this post 
of Prophet to his Nation was not of his seek- 
ing; Knox had lived forty years quietly ob- 
scure, before he became conspicuous. He was 
the son of poor parents; had got a college 
education; became a Priest; adopted the Re- 
formation, and seemed well content to guide 
his own steps by the light of it, nowise unduly 
intruding it on others. He had lived as 
Tutor in gentlemen's families; preaching 
when anybody of persons wished to hear his 
doctrine:- resolute he to walk by the truth, and 
speak the truth when called to do it ; not am- 
bitious of more ; not fancying himself capable 
of more. In this entirely obscure way he had 
reached the age of forty; was with the small 
body of Reformers who were standing siege in 
St. Andrew's Castle, — when one day in their 
chapel, the Preacher after finishing his exhor- 
tation to these fighters in the forlorn hope, said 
suddenly, That there ought to be other 
speakers, that all men who had a Priest's heart 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 207 

and gift in them ought now to speak ; which 
gifts and heart one of their own number, 
John Knox the name of him, had: Had he 
not? said the Preacher, appealing to all the 
audience: what then is his duty? The people 
answered affirmatively ; it was a criminal for- 
saken of his post, for such a man held the word 
that was in him silent. Poor Knox was 
obliged to stand up ; he attempted to reply ; he 
could say no word ; burst into a flood of tears 
and ran out. It is worth remembering, that 
scene. He was in grievous trouble for some 
days. He felt what a small faculty was his for 
this great work. He felt what a baptism he 
was called to be baptized with all. He 'burst 
into tears. ' 

Our primary characteristic of a hero, that he 
is sincere, applies emphatically to Knox. It 
is not denied anywhere, that this, whatever 
might be his other qualities or faults, is among 
the truest of men. With a singular instinct he 
holds to the truth and fact; the truth alone, is 
there for him, the rest a mere shadow and de- 
ceptive nonentity. However feeble, forlorn 
the reality may seem, on that and that only can 
he take his stand. In the Galleys of the River 
Loire, whether Knox, and the others, after their 
Castle of St. Andrew's was taken, had been 
sent as Galley-slaves, — some officer or priest, 
one day presented them an Image of the Virgin 
Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous 
heretics, should do it reverence. Mother? 
Mother of God? said Knox, when the turn 
came to him: This is no Mother of God: this 



208 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

is 'a pented bredd, ' — a piece of wood, I tell you, 
with paint on it ! She is fitter for swimming, 
I think, than for being worshiped, added 
Knox; and flung the thing into the river. It 
was not very cheap jesting there; but come of 
it what might, this thing to Knox was and 
must continue nothing other than the real 
truth; it was a pented bredd: worship it he 
would not. 

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest 
time, to be of courage; the Cause they had 
was the true one, and must and would pros- 
per; the whole world could not put it down. 
Reality is of God's making; it is alone strong. 
How many pented bredds, pretending to be 
real, are fitter to swim than to be worshiped ! 
— This Knox cannot live but by fact: he 
clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to 
the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man, 
by sincerity itself, becomes heroic; it is the 
grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good 
honest intellectual talent, no transcendent one; 
— a narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared 
with Luther: but in heartfelt instinctive 
adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say, he 
has no superior; nay, one might ask, What 
equal he has? The heart of him is of the true 
Prophet cast. "He lies there," said the Earl 
of Morton at his grave, "who never feared 
the face of man." He resembles, more than 
any of the moderns, an Old Hebrew Prophet. 
The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid 
narrow-looking adherence to God's truth, 
stern rebuke in the name of God to all that 






LECTURES ON HEROES. 209 

forsake truth: an Old- Hebrew Prophet in the 
guise of an Edinburgh Minister of the Six- 
teenth Century. We are to take him for that; 
not require him to be other. 

Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh 
visits he used to make in her own palace, to 
reprove her there, have been much commented 
upon. Such cruelty, such coarseness fills us 
with indignation. On reading the actual, nar- 
rative of the business, what Knox said, and 
what Knox meant, I must say one's tragic feel- 
ing is rather disappointed. They are not so 
coarse, these speeches; they seem to me about 
as fine as the circumstances would permit! 
Knox was not there to do the courtier; he came 
on another errand. Whoever, reading these 
colloquies of his with the Queen, thinks they 
are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a 
delicate high lady, mistakes the purport and 
essence of them altogether. It was unfortun- 
ately not possible to be polite with the Queen 
of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the 
Nation and Cause of Scotland. A man who 
did not wish to see the land of his birth made 
a hunting-field for intriguing ambitious Guises, 
and the Cause of God trampled underfoot of 
Falsehoods, Formulas and the Devil's Cause, 
had no method of making himself agreeable ! 
r Better that women weep," said Morton, 
"than that bearded men be forced to weep." 
Knox was the constitutional opposition party 
in Scotland : the Nobles of the country, called 
by their station to take that post, were not 
found in it; Knox had to go, or no one. The 

14 



210 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

hapless Queen; — but the still more hapless 
Country, if she were made happy! Mary her- 
self was not without sharpness enough, among 
her other qualities: "Who are you," said she 
once, "that presume to school the nobles and 
sovereign of this realm?" — "Madam, a subject 
born within the same," answered he. Reason- 
ably answered! If the 'subject' have truth to 
speak, it is not the 'subject's' footing that will 
fail him here. — 

We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, 
surely it is good that each of us be as tolerant 
as possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talk 
there is and has been about it, what is toler- 
ance? Tolerance has to tolerate the unessen- 
tial ; and to see well what that is. Tolerance 
has to be noble, measured, just in its very 
wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, 
on the whole, we are not altogether here to 
tolerate ! We are here to resist, to control and 
vanquish withal. We do not 'tolerate' False- 
hoods, Thieveries, Iniquities, when they fasten 
on us; we say to them, Thou art false, thou 
art not tolerable ! We are here to extinguish 
Falsehoods, and put an end to them, in some 
wise way ! I will not quarrel so much with the 
way; the doing of the thing is our great con- 
cern. In this sense Knox was, full surely, 
intolerant. 

A man sent to row in French Galleys, and 
suchlike, for teaching the Truth in his own 
land, cannot always be in the mildest humor! 
I am not prepared to say that Knox had a soft 
temper; nor do I know that he had what we 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 211 

call an ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly 
had not. Kind honest affections dwelt in the 
much-enduring, hard-worn, ever-battling man. 
That he could rebuke Queens, and had such 
weight among those proud turbulent Nobles, 
proud enough whatever else they were; and 
could maintain to the end a kind of virtual 
Presidency and Sovereignty in that wild realm, 
he who was only 'a subject born within the 
same:' this of itself will prove to us that he 
was found, close at hand, to be no mean, acrid 
man ; but?at heart a healthful, strong, sagacious 
man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind. 
They blame him for pulling down cathedrals, 
and so forth, as if he were a seditious rioting 
demagogue : precisely the reverse is seen to be 
the fact, in regard to cathedrals and the rest of 
it, if we examine ! Knox wanted no pulling 
down of stone edifices; he wanted leprosy and 
darkness to be thrown out of the lives of men. 
Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic 
feature of his life that he was forced to dwell 
so much in that. Every such man is the born 
enemy of Disorder; hates to be in it: but what 
then? Smooth Falsehood is not Order; it is 
the general sum total of Disorder. Order is 
Truth, — each thing standing on the basis that 
belongs to it: Order and Falsehood cannot 
subsist together. 

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has 
a vein of drollery in him; which I like much, 
in combination with his other qualities. He 
has a true eye for the ridiculous. His History, 
with its rough earnestness, is curiously enliv- 



212 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ened with this. When the two Prelates, 
entering Glasgow Cathedral, quarrel about 
precedence ; march rapidly up. take to hustling 
one another, twitching one another's rochets, 
and at last nourishing their crosiers like quar- 
ter-staves, it is a great sight for him every 
way ! Not mockery, scorn, bitterness alone ; 
though there is enough of that too. But a 
true, loving, illuminating laugh mounts up 
over the earnest visage ; not a loud laugh ; you 
would say, a laugh in the eyes most of all. 
An honest-hearted, brotherly man; brother 
to the high, brother also to the low ; sincere in 
his sympathy with both. He had his pipe of 
Bourdeaux too, we find, in that old Edinburgh 
house of his; a cherry social man, with faces 
that loved him ! They go far wrong who think 
this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking 
fanatic. Not at all: he is one of the solidest 
of men. Practical, cautious-hopeful, patient; 
a most shrewd, observing, quietly discerning 
man. In fact, he has very much the type of 
character we assign to the Scotch at present : 
a certain sardonic taciturnity is in him ; insight 
enough ; and a stouter heart than he himself 
knows of. He has the power of holding his 
peace over many things which do not vitally 
concern him, — "The}^? what are they?" But 
the thing which does vitally concern him, that 
thing he will speak of; and in a tone the whole 
world shall be made to hear: all the more 
emphatic for his long silence. 

This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hate- 
ful man! — He had a sore fiofht of an existence; 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 213 

wrestling with Popes and Principalities; in 
defeat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing 
as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A 
sore fight: but he won it. "Have you hope?" 
they asked him in his last moment, when he 
could no longer speak. He lifted his finger, 
'pointed upward with his finger,' and so died. 
Honor him! His works have not died. The 
letter of his work dies, as of all men's; but 
the spirit of it never. 

One word more as to the letter of Knox's 
work. The unforgivable offense in him is, 
that he wished to set-up Priests over the head 
of Kings. In other words, he strove to make 
the Government of Scotland a Theocracy. 
This indeed is properly the sum of his 
offenses, the essential sin ; for which what par- 
don can there be? It is most true, he did, at 
bottom, consciously or unconsciously, mean 
a Theocracy, or Government of God. He did 
mean that Kings and Prime Ministers, and all 
manner of persons, in public or private, 
diplomatizing or whatever else they might be 
doing, should walk according to the Gospel of 
Christ, and understand that this was their 
Law, supreme over all laws. He hoped once 
to see such a thing realized ; and the Petition, 
Thy Kingdom come, no longer an empty 
word. He was sore grieved when he saw 
greedy worldly Barons clutch hold of the 
Church's property; when he expostulated that 
it was not secular property, that it was spirit- 
ual property, and should be turned to true 
churchly uses, education, schools, worship; — 



214 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

and the Regent Murray had to answer with a 
shrug- of the shoulders, 4 ' It is a devout imag- 
ination!" This was Knox's scheme of right 
and truth ; this he zealously endeavored after, 
to realize it. If we think his scheme of truth 
was too narrow, was not true, we may rejoice 
that he could not realize it ; that it remained 
after two centuries of effort, unrealizable, and 
is a 'devout imagination' still. But how shall 
we blame him for struggling to realize it? 
Theocracy, Government of God, is precisely 
the thing to be struggled for! All Prophets, 
zealous Priests, are there for that purpose. 
Hildebrand wished a Theocracy; Cromwell 
wished it, fought for it; Mahomet attained it. 
Nay, is it not what all zealous men, whether 
called Priests, Prophets, or whatsoever else 
called, do essentially wish, and must wish? 
That right and truth, or God's law, reign 
supreme among men, this is the Heavenly 
Ideal (well named in Knox's time, and nam- 
able in all times, a revealed 'Will of God') 
toward which the Reformer will insist that all 
be more and more approximated. All true 
Reformers, as I said, are by the nature of 
them Priests, and strive for a Theocracy. 

How far such Ideals can ever be introduced 
into Practice, and at what point our impatience 
with their non-introduction ought to begin, is 
always a question. I think we may say 
safely, Let them introduce themselves as far 
as they can contrive to do it! If they are the 
true faith of men, all men ought to be more or 
less impatient always where they are not found 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 215 

introduced. There will never be wanting 
Regent- Murrays enough to shrug their shoul- 
ders, and say, "A devout imagination!" We 
will praise the Hero-priest rather, who does 
what is in him to bring them in; and wears- 
out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble 
life, to make a God's Kingdom of this Earth. 
The Earth will not become too godlike ! 



216 LECTURES ON HEROES. 



LECTURE V. 

THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUS- 
SEAU, BURNS. 

[Tuesday, 19th May, 1840.] 

Hero-gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are 
forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages, 
make their appearance in the remotest times; 
some of them have ceased to be possible long 
since, and cannot any more show themselves 
in this world. The Hero as Man of Letters, 
again, of which class we are to speak to-day, 
is altogether a product of these new ages ; and 
so long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of 
Ready-writing which we call Printing, sub- 
sists, he may be expected to continue, as one 
of the main forms of Heroism for all future 
ages. He is, in various respects, a very sing- 
ular phenomenon. 

He is new, I say ; he has hardly lasted above 
a century in the world yet. Never, till about 
a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure 
of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous 
manner; endeavoring to speak forth the 
inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, 
and find place and subsistence by what the 
world would please to give him for doing that. 
Much had been sold and bought, and left to 
make its own bargain in the marketplace ; but 
216 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 217 

the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never 
till then, in that naked manner. He, with his 
copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his squalid 
garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is 
what he does), from his grave, after death, 
whole nations and generations who would, or 
would not, give him bread while living, — is a 
rather curious spectacle! Few shapes of 
Heroism can be more unexpected. 

Alas, the Hero form of old has had to cramp 
himself into strange shapes : the world knows 
not well at any time what to do with him, so 
foreign is his aspect in the world ! It seemed 
absurd to us, that men in their rude admira 
tion, should take some wise great Odin for a 
god, and worship him as such; some wise 
great Mahomet for one god-inspired, and relig- 
iously follow his Law for twelve centuries; 
but that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, a 
Rosseau, should be taken for some idle non- 
descript, extant in the world to amuse idle- 
ness, and have a few coins and applauses 
thrown him, that he might live thereby; this 
perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem a 
still absurder phasis of things! — Meanwhile, 
since it is the spiritual always that determines 
the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero 
must be regarded as our most important mod- 
ern person. He, such as he may be, is the 
soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world 
will do and make. The world's manner of 
dealing with him is the most significant fea- 
ture of the world's general position. Looking 
well at his life, we may get a glance, as deep 



218 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

as is readily possible for us, into the life of 
those singular centuries which have produced 
him, in which we ourselves live and work. 

There are genuine Men of Letters, and not 
genuine ; as in every kind there is a genuine 
and a spurious. If Hero be taken to mean 
genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of Let- 
ters will be found discharging a function for 
us which is ever honorable, ever the highest ; 
and was once well known to be the highest. 
He is uttering forth, in such way as he has, 
the inspired soul of him ; all that a man, in any 
case, can do. I say inspired ; for what we call 
* originality, ' Sincerity,' 'genius,' the heroic 
quality we have no good name for, signifies 
that. The Hero is he who lives in the inward 
sphere of things, in the True, Divine and 
Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, 
under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in 
that; he declares that abroad, by act or speech 
as it may be, in declaring himself abroad. 
His life, as we said before, is a piece of the 
everlasting heart of Nature herself: all men's 
life is, — but the weak men know not the fact, 
and are untrue to it, in most times; the strong 
few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it 
cannot be hidden from them. The Man of 
Letters, like every Hero, is there to proclaim 
this in such sort as he can. Intrinsically it is 
the same function which the old generations 
named a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity, for 
doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech 
or by act, are set into the world to do. 

Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 219 



some forty years ago at Erlangen, a highly 
remarkable Course of Lectures on this subject: 
* Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrte?i, On the Nature 
of the Literary Man. ' Fichte, in conformity 
"with the Transcendental Philosophy, of which 
he was a distinguished teacher, declares first : 
^That all things which we see or work with in 
this Earth, especially we ourselves and all 
persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous 
Appearance: that under all there lies, as the 
.essence of them, what he calls the 'Divine Idea 
jof the World;' this is the Reality which 'lies at 
, the bottom of all Appearance. ' To the mass 
'of men no such Divine Idea is recognizable in 
jthe world; they live merely, says Fichte, 
r among the superficialities, practicalities and 
shows of the world, not dreaming that there is 
| anything divine under them. But the Man of 
Letters is sent hither specially that he may dis- 
cern for himself, and make manifest to us, this 
,-same Divine Idea: in every new generation it 
\ will manifest itself in a new dialect; and he is 
'i there for the purpose of doing that. Such is 
. Fichte's phraseology; with which we need not 
': quarrel. It is his way of naming what I here, 
'by other words, am striving imperfectly to 
name; what there is at present no name for: 
' The unspeakable Divine Significance, full of 
; splendor, of wonder and terror that lies in the 
being of every man, of every thing, — the Pres- 
ence of the God who made every man and thing. 
Mahomet taught this in his dialect; Odin in 
his: it is the thing which all thinking hearts, 
in one dialect or another, are here to teach. 



220 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a 
Prophet, or as he prefers to phrase it, a Priest, 
continually unfolding the Godlike to men: 
Men of Letters are a perpetual Priesthood, 
from age to age, teaching all men that God is 
still present in their life: that all 'Appearance,' 
whatsover we see in the world, is but as a ves- 
ture for the 'Divine Idea of the World,' for 
4 that which lies at the bottom of Appearance. ' 
In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, 
acknowledged or not by the world, a sacred- 
ness : he is the light of the world ; the world's 
Priest, — guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, 
in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of 
Time. Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal 
the true Literary Man, what we here call the 
Hero as Man of Letters, from multitudes of 
false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly in 
this Divine Idea, or living partially in it, strug- 
gles not, as for the one good, to live wholly in it, 
— he is, let him live where else he like, in what 
pomps and prosperities he like, no Literary 
man ; he is, says Fichte, a ' Bungler, Stumper. ' 
Or at best, if he belong to the prosaic pro- 
vinces, he may be a 'Hodman;' Fichte even 
calls him elsewhere a 'Nonentity,' and has in 
short no mercy for him, no wish that he should 
continue happy among us! This is Fichte's 
notion of the Man of Letters. It means, in its 
own form, precisely what we here mean. 

In this point of view, I consider that, for the 
last hundred years, by far the notablest of all 
Literary Men is Fichte's countryman, Goethe. 
To that man too, in a strange way, there was 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 221 

given what we may call a life in the Divine 
Idea of the World ; vision of the inward divine 
mystery: and strangely, out of his Books, the 
world rises imaged once more as godlike, the 
;workmanship and temple of a God. Illum- 
inated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor as 
of Mahomet, but in mild celestial radiance ; — 
really a Prophecy in these most unprophetic 
times; to my mind, by far the greatest, though 
one of the quietest, among all the great things 
that have come to pass in them. Our chosen 
specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would 
be this Goethe. And it were a very pleasant 
plan for me here to discourse of his heroism : 
for I consider him to be a true Hero; heroic in 
what he said and did, and perhaps still more 
in what he did not say and did not do; to me 
a noble spectacle: a great heroic ancient man, 
speaking and keeping silence as an ancient 
Hero, in the guise of a most modern, high-bred, 
high cultivated Man of Letters! We have had 
;no such spectacle; no man capable of affording 
such, for the last hundred and fifty years. 

But at present, such is the general state of 
[knowledge about Goethe, it were worse than 
luseless to attempt speaking of him in this case. 
Speak as I might, Goethe, to the great major- 
ity of you, would remain problematic, vague ; 
no impression but a false one could be realized. 
Him we must leave to future times. Johnson, 
Burns, Rousseau, three great figures from a 
prior time, form a far inferior state of circum- 
stances, will suit us better here. Three men 
of the Eighteenth Century ; the conditions of 



222 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

their life far more resemble what those of ours 
still are in England, than what Goethe's in 
Germany were. Alas, these men did not con- 
quer like him ; they fought bravely, and fell. 
They were not heroic bringers of the light, 
but heroic seekers of it. They lived under 
galling conditions; struggling as under moun- 
tains of impediment, and could not unfold 
themselves into clearness, or victorious inter- 
pretation of that 'Divine Idea.' It is rather 
the Tombs of three Literary Heroes that I 
have to show you. There are the monu- 
mental heaps under which three spiritual 
giants lie buried. Very mournful, but also 
great and full of interest for us. We will linger 
by them for a while. 

Complaint is often made, in these times, of 
what we call the disorganized condition of 
society: how ill many arranged forces of society 
fulfil their work: how many powerful forces 
are seen working in a wasteful chaotic, alto- 
gether unarranged manner. It is too just a 
complaint, as we all know. But perhaps if we 
look at this of Books and the Writers of Books, 
we shall find here, as it were, the summary of 
all other disorganization; — a sort of heart, 
from which, and to which, all other confusion 
circulates in the world! Considering what 
Book- writers do with the world, and what the 
world does with book-writers, I should say, It 
is the most anomalous thing the world at 
present has to show. — We should get into a sea 
far beyond sounding, did we attempt to give 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 223 

, account of this: but we must glance at it for 
the sake of our subject. The worst element 
in the life of these three Literary Heroes was, 
that they found their business and position such 
a chaos. On the beaten road there is tolerable 

j traveling; but it is sore work, and many have 
to perish, fashioning a path through the 

£ impassable! 

Our pious Fathers, feeling well what import- 
ance lay in the speaking of man to men, 
founded churches, made endowments, regula- 
tions; everywhere in the civilized world there 
is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of com- 
plex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, 
that therefrom a man with the tongue may, to 
best advantage, address his fellow-men. They 
felt that this was the most important thing ; 
that without this there was no good thing. It 
as a right pious work, that of theirs; beautiful 
to behold! But now with the art of Writing, 
with the art of Printing, a total change has 
come over that business. The Writer of a 
Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not to 
this parish or that, on this day or that, but to 
all men in all times and places? Surely it is of 
the last importance that he do his work right, 
whoever do it wrong ; — that the eye report not 
calsely, for then all the other members are 
astray! Well; how he may do his work, 
whether he do it right or wrong, or do it at all, 
is a point which no man in the world has taken 
'.he pains to think of. To a certain shopkeeper, 
crying to get some money for his books, if 
ucky, he is of some importance ; to no other 



224 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

man of any. Whence he came, whither he is 
bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he 
might be furthered on his course, no one asks. 
He is an accident in society. He wanders like 
a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as 
the spiritual light, either the guidance or the 
misguidance! 

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most 
miraculous of all things man has devised. 
Odin's Runes were the first form of the work 
of a Hero ; Books, written words, are still mir- 
aculous Runes, the latest form ! In Books lies 
the soul of the whole TastTime; the articulate 
audible voice of the Past, when the body and 
material substance of it has altogether van- 
ished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, 
harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, 
many-engined, — they are precious, great: but 
what do they become? Agamemnon, the many 
Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece ; 
all is gone now to some ruined fragments, 
dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the 
Books of Greece! There Greece, to every 
thinker, still very literally lives; can be called- 
up again into life ; No magic Rune is stranger 
than a Book. All that Mankind has done, 
thought, gained, been : it is lying as in magic 
preservation in the pages of Books. They are 
the chosen possession of men. 

Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as 
Runes were fabled to do? They persuade men. 
Not the wretched est circulating-library novel, 
which foolish girls thumb and con in remote 
villages, but will help to regulate the actual 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 225 

practical weddings and households of those 
foolish girls. So 'Celia' felt, so 'Clifford' 
acted; the foolish Theorem of Life, stamped 
into those young brains, comes out as a solid 
Practice one day. Consider whether any 
Rune in the wildest imagination of Mythologist 
ever did such wonders as, on the actual firm 
Earth, some Books have done ! What built St. 
Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of the 
matter, it was that divine Hebrew Book, — the 
word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tend- 
ing his Midianitish herds, four thousand years 
ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the 
strangest of things, yet nothing is truer. With 
the art of Writing, of which Printing is a 
simple, an inevitable and comparatively insig- 
nificant corollary, the true reign of miracles 
for mankind commenced. It related, with a 
wondrous new contiguity and perpetual close- 
ness, the Past and Distant with the Present in 
time and place ; all times and all places with 
i this our actual Here and Now. All things 
i were altered for men ; all modes of important 
.work of men: teaching, preaching, governing, 
;i and all else. 

To look at Teaching, for instance. Univer- 
;i sities are a notable, respectable product of the 
.! modern ages. Their existence too is modified, 
I to the very basis of it, by the existence of 
! Books. Universities arose while there were 
; yet no Books procurable ; while a man, for a 
single Book, had to give an estate of land. 
: That, in these circumstances, when a man had 
some knowledge to communicate, he should do 

15 Heroes 



226 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

it by gathering the learners round him, face 
to face, was a necessity for him. If you wanted 
to know what Abelard knew, you must go and 
listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as 
thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and 
that metaphysical theology of his. And now 
for any other teacher who had also something 
of his own to teach, there was a great con- 
venience opened: so many thousands eager to 
learn were already assembled yonder; of all 
places the best place for him was that. For 
any third teacher it was better still ; and grew 
ever the better, the more teachers there came. 
It only needed now that the King took notice 
of this new phenomenon; combined or agglom- 
erated the various schools into one school; 
gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, 
and named it Umversttas, or School of all 
Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essen- 
tial characters, was there. The model of all 
subsequent Universities; which down even to 
these days, for six centuries now, have gone 
on to found themselves. Such, I conceive, 
was the origin of Universities. 

It is clear, however, that with this simple 
circumstance, facility of getting Books, the 
whole conditions of the business from top to 
bottom were changed. Once invent Printing, 
you metamorphosed all Universities, or super- 
seded them! The Teacher needed not now to 
gather men personally round him, that he 
might speak to them what he knew: print it 
in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for 
a trifle, had it each at his own fireside, much 









LECTURES ON HEROES. 227 

more effectually to learn it! — Doubtless there 
is still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writers 
of Books may still, in some circumstances, 
find it convenient to speak also, — witness our 
present meeting- here! There is, one would 
say, and must ever remain while man has a 
tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well 
as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all 
things this must remain; to Universities 
among others. But the limits of the two have 
nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; 
much less put in practice: the University 
which would completely take in that great new 
fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and 
stand on a clear footing for the Nineteenth 
Century as the Paris one did for the Thir- 
teenth, has not yet come into existence. If we 
think of it, all that a University or final 
highest School can do for us, is still but what 
the first School began doing, — teach us to 
read. We learn to read, in various languages, 
in various sciences; we learn the alphabet 
and letters of all manner of Books. But the 
place where we are to get knowledge, even 
theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! 
It depends on what we read, after all manner 
of Professors have done their best for us. The 
true University of these days is a Collection 
of Books. 

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, 
all is changed, in its preaching, in its work- 
ing, by the introduction of Books. The 
Church is the working recognized Union of 
our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise 



228 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

teaching guide the souls of men. While there 
was no Writing, even while there was no Easy- 
writing or Printing, the preaching of the voice 
was the natural sole method of performing 
this. But now with Books! — He that can write 
a true Book, to persuade England, is not he 
the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of 
England and of All England? I many a time 
say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, 
Poems, Books, these are the real working 
effective Church of a modern country. Nay 
not only our preaching, but even our worship, 
is not it too accomplished by means of Printed 
Books? The noble sentiment which a gifted 
soul has clothed for us in melodious words, 
which brings melody into our hearts, — is not 
this essentially, if we will understand it, of the 
nature of worship? There are many, in all 
countries, who, in this confused time, have no 
other method of worship. He who, in any 
way, shows us better than we knew before 
that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not 
show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of 
all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible 
there, of the great Maker of the Universe? 
He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a 
little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. 
How much more he who sings, who says, or in 
any way brings home to our heart the noble 
doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a 
brother man ! He has verily touched our hearts 
as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps 
there is no worship more authentic. 

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 229 

'apocalypse of Nature,' a revealing of the 'open 
secret.' It may well enough be named, in 
Fichte's style, a 'continuous revelation' of the 
Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common. The 
Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there ; 
is brought out, now in this dialect, now in 
that, with various degrees of clearness : all 
true gifted Singers and Speakers are, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark 
stormful indignation of a Byron, so wayward 
and perverse, may have touches of it; nay the 
withered mockery of a French sceptic, — his 
mockery of the False, a love and worship of 
the True. How much more the sphere-har- 
mony of a Shakespeare, of a Goethe ; the cathe- 
dral music of a Milton ! They are something 
too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a 
Burns, — skylark, starting from the humble 
furrow, far overhead into the blue depths, and 
singing to us so genuinely there! For all true 
singing is of the nature of worship; as indeed 
all true working may be said to be, — whereof 
such singing is but the record, and fit melo- 
dious representation, to us. Fragments of a 
i real 'Church Liturgy' and 'Body of Homilies,' 
: strangely disguised from the common eye. 
;are to be found weltering in that huge froth- 
:ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call Litera- 
ture! Books are our Church too. 

Or turning now to the Government of men. 
Witenagemote, old Parliament, was a great 
; thing. The affairs of the nation were there de- 
liberated and decided; what we were to do as 
a nation. But does not, though the name Par- 



230 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

liament subsists, the parliamentary debate go 
on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far 
more comprehensive way, out of Parliament 
altogether? Burke said there were Three Es- 
tates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gal- 
lery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more 
important far than they all. It is not a figure 
of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, 
— very momentous to us in these times. Liter- 
ature is our Parliament too. Printing, which 
comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, 
is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, 
Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings 
Printing; brings universal every-day extem- 
pore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever 
can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, 
becomes a power, a branch of government, 
with inalienable weight in law-making, in all 
acts of authority. It matters not what rank he 
has, what revenues or garnitures : the requisite 
thing is, that he have a tongue which others 
will listen to; this and nothing more is requi- 
site. The nation is governed by all that has 
tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually 
there. Add only, that whatsoever power exists 
will have itself, by and by, organized; work- 
ing secretly under bandages, obscurations, 
obstructions, it will never rest till it get to 
work free, unencumbered, visible to all. De- 
mocracy virtually extant will insist on becom- 
ing palpably extant. — 

On all sides, are we not driven to the con- 
clusion that, of the things which man can do 
or make here below, by far the most moment- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 231 



bus, wonderful and worthy are the things we 
all Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with 

rtpblack ink on them; — from the Daily News- 
Ipaper to the sacred Hebrew Book, what have 
they not done, what are they not doing! — For 
'indeed, whatever be the outward form of the 
thing (bits of paper, as we say, and black ink), 
Is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of 
man's faculty that produces a Book? It is the 
'Thought of man ; the true thaumaturgic vir- 
tue; by which man works all things whatso- 
ever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is 
'the vesture of a Thought. This London City, 
with all its houses, palaces, steam engines, 
'cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and 
tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions 
of Thoughts made into One; — a huge im- 
'measurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in 
brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parlia- 
ments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, 
and the rest of it ! Not a brick was made but 
some man had to think of the making of that 

; brick. — The thing we call 'bits of paper with 
traces of black ink,' is the purest embodiment 

<a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, 
in all ways, the activest and noblest. 

All this, of the importance and supreme im- 

Iportance of the Man of Letters in modern 
Society, and how the Press is to such a degree 
superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the 

. Senatus Academicus and much else, has been 
admitted for a good while; and recognized 
often enough, in late times, with a sort of sen- 
timental triumph and wonderment. It seems 



232 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to 
give place to the Practical. If Men of Letters 
are so incalculably influential, actually per- 
forming such work for us from age to age, and 
even from day to day, then I think we may 
conclude that Men of Letters will not always 
wander like unrecognized unregulated Ismael- 
ites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I said 
above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast 
off its wrappages, bandages, and step-forth one 
day with palpably articulated, universally 
visible power. That one man wear the clothes, 
and take the wages, of a function which is 
done by quite another: there can be no profit 
in this; this is not right, it is wrong. And yet, 
alas, the making of it right, — what a business, 
for long times to come! Sure enough, this 
that we call Organization of the Literary Guild 
is still a great way off, encumbered with all 
manner of complexities. If you asked me what 
were the best possible organization for the 
Men of Letters in modern society; the ar- 
rangement of furtherance and regulation, 
grounded the most accurately on the actual 
facts of their position and of the world's posi 
tion, — I should beg to say that the proble 
far exceeded my faculty ! It is not one man 
faculty; it is that of many successive men 
turned earnestly upon it, that will bring out 
even an approximate solution. What the best 
arrangement were, none of us could say. But 
if you asked, Which is the worst? I answer: 
This which we now have, that Chaos should 
sit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the 



ai 

5 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 233 

best, or any good one, there is yet a long 
way. 

One remark I must not omit, That royal or 
parliamentary grants of money are by no 
means the chief thing wanted ! To give our 
Men of Letters stipends, endowments and all 
furtherance of cash, will do little toward the 
business. On the whole, one is weary of hear- 
ing about the omnipotence of money. I will 
say rather that, for a genuine man, it is no 
evil to be poor; that there ought to be Literary 
Men poor, — to show whether they are genuine 
or not! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good 
men doomed to beg, were instituted in the 
Christian Church; a most natural and even 
necessary development of the spirit of Christ- 
ianity. It was itself founded on Poverty, on 
Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixtion, every 
species of worldly Distress and Degradation. 
We may say, that he who has not known those 
things, and learned from them the priceless 
lessons they have to teach, has missed a good 
opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go 
barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope 
round your loins, and be despised of all the 
world, was no beautiful business ; — nor an 
honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of 
those who did so had made it honored of 
some ! 

Begging is not in our course at the present 
time: but for the rest of it, who will say that 
a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being 
poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to 
know that outward profit, that success of any 

16 Heroes 



234 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

kind is not the goal he has to aim at. Pride, 
vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are 
bred in his heart, as in every heart; need, 
above all, to be cast-out of his heart, — to be, 
with whatever pangs, torn-out of it, cast-forth 
from it, as a thing worthless. Byron, born 
rich and noble, made-out even less than Burns 
poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that 
same 'best possible organization' as yet far 
off, Poverty may still enter as an important 
element? What if our Men of Letters, men 
setting-up to be Spiritual Heroes, were still 
then, as they are now, a kind of 'involuntary 
monastic order;' bound still to this same ugly 
Poverty, — till they had tried what was in it 
too, till they had learned to make it to do for 
them! Money, in truth, can do much, but it 
cannot do all. We must know the province 
of it, and confine it there; and even spurn it 
back, when it wishes to get farther. 

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the 
proper season for them, the fit assigner of 
them, all settled, — how is the Burns to be rec- 
ognized that merits these? He must pass 
through the ordeal, and prove himself. This 
ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is 
called Literary Life; this too is a kind of 
ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea that 
a struggle from the lower classes of society, 
toward the upper regions and rewards of 
society, must ever continue. Strong men are 
born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than 
there. The manifold, inextricably complex, 
universal struggle of these constitutes, and 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 235 

must constitute, what is called the progress of 
society. For Men of Letters, as for all other 
sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle? 
There is the whole question. To leave it as it 
is, at the mercy of blind Chance ; a whirl of 
distracted atoms, one canceling the other; one 
of the thousand arriving saved, nine-hundred 
and-ninety-nine lost by the way; your royal 
Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or 
harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your 
Burns dying broken-hearted as a Ganger; 
your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, 
kindling French Revolutions by his para- 
doxes: this, as we said, is clearly enough the 
worst regulation. The best, alas, is far from us ! 

And yet there can be no doubt but it is com- 
ing; advancing on us, as yet hidden in the 
bosom of centuries : this is a prophecy one can 
risk. For so soon as men get to discern the 
importance of a thing, they do infallibly set 
about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; 
and rest not till, in some approximate degree, 
they have accomplished that. I say, of all 
Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes 
at present extant in the world, there is no class 
comparable for importance to that Priesthood 
of the Writers of Books. This is a fact which 
he who runs may read, — and draw inferences 
from. "Literature will take care of itself," 
answered Mr. Pitt, when applied-to for some 
help for Burns. "Yes," adds Mr. Southey, 
"it will take care of itself, and of you too, if 
you do not look to it!" 

The result to individual Men of Letters is 



236 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

not the momentous one ; they are but individ- 
uals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great 
body ; they can struggle on, and live or else 
die, as they have been wont. But it deeply 
concerns the whole society, whether it will set 
its light on high places, to walk thereby ; or 
trample it under foot, and scatter it in all ways 
of wild waste (not without conflagration), as 
heretofore! Light is the one thing wanted 
for the world. Put wisdom in the head of the 
world, the world will fight its battle victori- 
ously, and be the best world man can make it. 
I call this anomaly of a disorganic Literary 
Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once 
product and parent ; some good arrangement 
for that would be as the punctum saliens of a 
new vitality and just arrangement for all. 
Already, in some European countries, in 
France, in Prussia, one traces some begin- 
nings of an arrangement for the Literary 
Class; indicating the gradual possibility of 
such. I believe that it is possible; that it will 
have to be possible. 

By far the most interesting fact I hear about 
the Chinese is one on which we cannot arrive 
at clearness, but which excites endless curios- 
ity even in the dim state: this, namely, that 
they do attempt to make their men of Letters 
their Governors ! It would be rash to say, one 
understood how this was done, or with what 
degree of success it was done. All such things 
must be very unsuccessful; yet a small degree 
of success is precious; the very attempt how 
precious! There does seem to be, all over 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 237 

China, a more or less active search everywhere 
to discover the men of talent that grow up in 
the young generation. Schools there are for 
every one : a foolish sort of training, yet still a 
sort. The youths who distinguish themselves 
in the lower school are promoted into favorable 
stations in the higher, that they may still more 
distinguish themselves, — forward and forward: 
it appears to be out of these that the Official 
Persons, and incipient Governors, are taken. 
These are they whom they try first, whether 
they can govern or not. And surely with the 
best hope: for they are the men that have 
already shown intellect. Try them : they have 
not governed or administered as yet ; perhaps 
they cannot ; but there is no doubt they have 
some Understanding, — without which no man 
can! Neither is Understanding a tool, as we 
are too apt to figure; 'it is a hand which can 
handle any tool. ' Try these men : they are of 
all others the best worth trying. — Surely, there 
is no kind of government, constitution, revolu- 
tion, social apparatus or arrangement, that I 
know of in this world, so promising to one's 
scientific curiosity as this. The man of intel- 
lect at the top of affairs : this is the aim of all 
constitutions and revolutions, if they have any 
aim. For the man of true intellect, as I assert 
and believe always, is the noble-hearted man 
withal, the true, just, humane and valiant 
man. Get him for governor, all is got; fail to 
get him, though you had Constitutions plenti- 
ful as blackberries, and a Parliament in every 
village, there is nothing yet got ! — 



238 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

' These things look strange, truly and are not 
such as we commonly speculate upon. But we 
are fallen into strange times ; these things will 
require to be speculated upon ; to be rendered 
practicable, to be in some way put in practice. 
These, and many others. On all hands of us, 
there is the announcement, audible enough, 
that the old Empire of Routine has ended; 
that to say a thing has long been, is no reason 
for its continuing to be. The things which 
have been are fallen into decay, are fallen into 
incompetence; large masses of mankind, in 
every society of our Europe, are no longer 
capable of living at all by the things which 
have been. When millions of men can no 
longer by their utmost exertion gain food for 
themselves, and 'the third man for thirty-six 
weeks each year is short of third-rate pota- 
toes,' the things which have been must decid- 
edly prepare to alter themselves ! — I will now 
quit this of the organization of Men of Letters. 
Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those 
Literary Heroes of ours was not the want of 
organization for Men of Letters, but a far 
deeper one ; out of which, indeed, this and so 
many other evils for the Literary Man, and for 
all men, had, as from their fountain, taken 
rise. That our Hero as Man of Letters had to 
travel without highway, companionless, 
through an inorganic chaos, — and to leave his 
own life and faculty lying there, as a partial 
contribution toward pushing some highway 
through it: this, had not his faculty itself been 
so perverted and paralyzed, he might have put- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 239 

up with, might have considered to be but the 
common lot of Heroes. His fatal misery was 
the spiritual paralysis, so we may name it, of 
the Age in which his life lay ; whereby his life, 
too, do what he might, was half-paralyzed! 
The Eighteenth was a Skeptical Century; in 
which little word there is a whole Pandora's 
Box of miseries. Skepticism means not intel- 
lectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all 
sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paraly- 
sis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could 
specify since the world began, was a life of 
Heroism more difficult for a man. That was 
not an age of Faith, — an age of Heroes! The 
very possibilit}' of Heroism had been, as it 
were, formally abnegated in the minds of all. 
Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Form- 
ulism and Commonplace were come forever. 
The 'age of miracles' had been, or perhaps 
had not been ; but it was not any longer. An 
effete world ; wherein Wonder, Greatness, God- 
hood could not now dwell; — in one word, a 
godless world ! 

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of think- 
ing, in this time, — compared not with the 
Christian Shakespeares and Miltons, but with 
the old Pagan Skalds, with any species of be- 
lieving men! The living Tree Igdrasil, with 
the melodious prophetic waving of its world- 
wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has died out 
into the clanking of a World-Machine. 'Tree' 
and 'Machine:' contrast these two things. I, 
for my share, declare the world to be no ma- 
chine ! I say that it does not go by wheel-and- 



240 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

pinion "motives," self-interests, checks, bal- 
ances; that there is something- far other in it 
than the clank of spinning-jennies, and parlia- 
mentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it 
is not a machine at all! The old Norse 
Heathen had a truer notion of God's-world 
than these poor Machine-Skeptics: the old 
Heathen Norse were sincere men. But for 
these poor Skeptics there was no sincerity, no 
truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called 
truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibil- 
ity ; to be measured by the number of votes 
5^ou could get. They had lost any notion that 
sincerity was possible, or of what sincerity 
was. How many Plausibilities asking, with 
unaffected surprise and the air of offended vir- 
tue, What! am not I sincere? Spiritual Paraly- 
sis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanical life, 
was the characteristic of that century. For 
the common man, unless happily he stood be- 
low his century and belonged to another prior 
one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero ; 
he lay buried, unconscious, under these bale- 
ful influences. To the strongest man, only 
with infinite struggle and confusion was it pos- 
sible to work himself half-loose ; and lead as it 
were, in an enchanted, most tragical way, a 
spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero! 
Skepticism is the name we give to all this ; as 
the chief symptom, as the chief origin of all 
this. Concerning which so much were to be 
said! It would take many Discourses, not a 
small fraction of one Discourse, to state what 
one feels about that Eighteenth Century and 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 241 

its ways. As, indeed, this, and the like of this, 
which we now call Skepticism, is precisely the 
black malady and life-foe, against which all 
teaching and discoursing since man's life be- 
gan has directed itself; the battle of Belief 
against Unbelief is the never-ending battle! 
Neither is it in the way of crimination that one 
would wish to speak. Skepticism, for that 
century, we must consider as the decay of old 
ways of believing, the preparation afar off for 
new, better and wider ways, — an inevitable 
thing. We will not blame men for it ; we will 
lament their hard fate. We will understand 
that destruction of old forms is not destruction 
of everlasting substances ; that Skepticism, as 
sorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not an 
end but a beginning. 

The other day speaking, without prior pur- 
pose that way, of Bentham's theory of man 
and man's life, I chanced to call it a more 
beggarly one than Mahomet's. I am bound to 
say, now when it is once uttered, that such is 
my deliberate opinion. Not that one would 
mean offense against the man Jeremy Ben- 
tham, or those who respect and believe him. 
Bentham himself, and even the creed of Ben- 
tham, seems to me comparatively worthy of 
praise. It is a determinate being what all the 
world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner, was 
tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall 
either have death or the cure. I call this 
gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach 
toward new Faith. It was a laying- down of 
cant; a saying to oneself: "Well, then, this 

16 



242 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

world is a dead iron machine, the god of it 
Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see 
what, by checking and balancing, and good 
adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made 
of it!" Benthamism has something complete, 
manful, in such fearless committal of itself to 
what it finds true;' you may call it Heroic, 
though a Heroism with its eyes put out! It is 
the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, 
of what lay in the half-and-half state, pervad- 
ing man's whole existence in that Eighteenth 
Century. It seems to me, all deniers of God- 
hood, and all lip-believers of it, are bound to 
be Benthamites, if they have courage and hon- 
esty. Benthamism is an eyeless Heroism: the 
Human Species, like a hapless blinded Samson 
grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps convul- 
sively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin 
down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of 
Bentham I meant to say no harm. 

But this I do say, and would wish all men to 
know and lay to heart, that he who discerns 
nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has 
in the fatalest way missed the secret of the 
Universe altogether. That all Godhood should 
vanish out of men's conception of this Uni- 
verse seems to me precisely the most brutal 
error, — I will not disparage Heathenism by 
calling it a Heathen error, — that men could 
fall into. It is not true: it is false at the very 
heart of it. A man who thinks so will think 
wrong about all things in the world; this orig- 
inal sin will vitiate all other conclusions he can 
form. One might call it the most lamentable 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 243 

of Delusions,— not forgetting Witchcraft itself! 
Witchcraft worshiped at least a living Devil; 
but this worships a dead iron Devil; no God, 
not even a Devil! — Whatsoever is noble, di- 
vine, inspired, drops thereby out of life. There 
remains everywhere in life a despicable caput- 
mortunm; the mechanical hull, all soul fled out 
of it. How can a man act heroically? The 
'Doctrine of Motives' will teach him that it 
is, under more or less disguise, nothing but a 
wretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain; that 
Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever 
victual it may be, is the ultimate fact of man's 
life. Atheism, in brief; — which does, indeed, 
frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is 
become spiritually a paralytic man ; this god- 
like Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, 
all working by motives, checks, balances, and 
I know not what; wherein, as in the detestable 
belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriv- 
ing, he the poor Phalaris sits miserably dying! 
Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's 
mind. It is a mysterious indescribable process, 
that of getting to believe; — indescribable, as 
all vital acts are. We have our mind given us, 
not that it may cavil and argue, but that it 
may see into something, give us clear belief 
and understanding about something whereon 
we are. then to proceed to act. Doubt, truly, 
is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rush 
out, clutch-up the first thing we find, and 
straightway believe that! manner of doubt, 
inquiry, about all manner of objects, dwells in 
every reasonable mind. It is the mystic work- 



244 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ing of the mind, on the object it is getting to 
know and believe. Belief comes out of all this, 
above ground, like the tree from its hidden roots. 
But now if, even on common things, we require 
that a man keep his doubts silent, and not bab- 
ble of them till they in some measure become 
affirmations or denials; how much more in 
regard to the highest things, impossible to speak 
of in words at all ! That a man parade his doubt, 
and get to imagine that debating and logic 
(which means at best only the manner of tell- 
ing us your thought, your belief or disbelief, 
about a thing) is the triumph and true work of 
what intellect he has: alas, this is as if you 
should overturn the tree, and instead of green 
boughs, leaves and fruits, show us ugly taloned 
roots turned up into the air, — and no growth, 
only death and misery going on! 

For the Skepticism, as I said, is not intel- 
lectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy 
and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by 
believing something; not by debating and 
arguing about many things. A sad case for 
him when all that he can manage to believe is 
something he can button in his pocket, and 
with one or the other organ eat and digest! 
Lower than that he will not get. We call 
those ages in which he gets so low the mourn- 
fulest, sickest and meanest of all ages. The 
world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any 
limb of it be whole? Genuine Acting ceases in 
all departments of the world's work; dextrous 
Similitude of Acting begins. The world's 
wages are pocketed, the world's work is not 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 245 

done. Heroes have gone out; Quacks have 
come in. Accordingly, what Century, since 
the end of the Roman world, which also was a 
time of skepticism, simulacra and universal 
decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that 
Eighteenth? Consider them, with their timid 
sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevo- 
lence, — the wretched Quack-squadron, Caglios- 
tro at the head of them ! Few men were with- 
out quackery; they had got to consider it a 
necessary ingredient and amalgam for truth. 
Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes 
down to the House, all wrapped and ban- 
daged; he 'has crawled out in great bodily 
suffering,' and so on: — forgets, says Walpole, 
that he is acting the sick man; in the fire of 
debate, snatches his arm from the sling, and 
oratorically swings and brandishes it! Chat- 
ham himself lives in the strangest mimetic life, 
half -hero, half-quack, all along. For, indeed, 
the world is full of dupes; and you have to 
gain the world's suffrage! How the duties of 
the world will be done in that case, what 
quantities of error, which means failure, which 
means sorrow and misery, to some and to 
many, will gradually accumulate in all prov- 
inces of the world's business, we need not 
compute. 

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on 
the heart of the world's maladies, when you 
call it a Skeptical World. An insincere world; 
a godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, 
as I consider, that the whole tribe of social 
pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, 



246 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

and what not, have derived their being, — their 
chief necessity to be. This must alter. Till 
this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My 
one hope of the world, my inexpugnable con- 
solation in looking at the miseries of the world, 
is that this is altering. Here and there one 
does now find a man who knows, as of old, 
that this world is a Truth, and no Plausibility 
and Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead 
or paralytic; and that the world is alive, in- 
stinct with Godhood, beautiful and awful, even 
as in the beginning of days! One man once 
knowing this, many men, all men, must by and 
by come to know it. It lies there clear, for 
whosoever will take the spectacles off his eyes 
and honestly look, to know ! For such a man 
the Unbelieving Century, with its unblessed 
Products, is already past: a new century is 
already come. The old unblessed Products 
and Performances, as solid as they look, are 
Phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To 
this and the other noisy, very great-looking 
Simulacrum with the whole world huzzahing at 
his heels, he can say, composedly stepping 
aside : Thou art not true ; thou art not extant, 
only semblant ; go thy way ! — Yes, hollow For- 
mulism, gross Benthamism, and other unhe- 
roic atheistic Insincerity is visibly and even 
rapidly declining. An unbelieving Eighteenth 
Century is but an exception, — such as now and 
then occurs. I prophesy that the world will 
once more become sincere.; a believing world ; 
with many Heroes in it, a heroic world! It 
will then be a victorious world ; never till then. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 247 

Or, indeed, what of the world and its vic- 
tories? Men speak too much about the world. 
Each one of us here, let the world go how it 
will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he 
not a Life of his own to lead? One Life: a lit- 
tle gleam of Time between two Eternities; 
no second chance to us forevermore! It were 
well for us to live not as fools and simulacra, 
but as wise and realities. The world's being 
saved will not save us; nor the world's being 
lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves: 
there is great merit here in the 'duty of stay- 
ing at home!' And, on the whole, to say 
truth, I never heard of 'worlds' being 'saved' 
in any other way. That mania of saving worlds 
is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with 
its windy sentimentalism. Let us not follow it 
too far. For the saving of the world I will 
trust confidently to the Maker of the world; 
and look a little to my own saving, which I am 
more competent to! — In brief, for the world's 
sake, and for our own, we will rejoice greatly 
that Skepticism, Insincerity, Mechanial Athe- 
ism, with all their poison-dews, are going, and 
as good as gone. — 

Now it was under such conditions, in those 
times of Johnson, that our Men of Letters had 
to live. Times in which there was properly 
no truth in life. Old truths had fallen nigh 
dumb ; the new lay yet hidden, not trying to 
speak. That Man's Life here below was a 
Sincerity and Fact, and would forever continue 
such, no new intimation, in that dusk of the 
world, had yet dawned. No intimation ; not 



248 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

even any French Revolution, — which we de- 
fine to be a Truth once more, though a Truth 
clad in hellfire ! How different was the Luth- 
er's pilgrimage, with its assured goal, from 
the Johnson's, girt with mere traditions, sup- 
positions, grown now incredible, unintelligi- 
ble! Mahomet's Formulas were of 'wood 
waxed and oiled,' and could 'be burnt out of 
one's way: poor Johnson's were far more diffi- 
cult to burn. — The strong man will ever find 
work, which means difficulty, pain, to the full 
measure of his strength. But to make out a 
victory, in those circumstances of our poor 
Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more 
difficult than in any. Not obstruction, disor- 
ganization, Bookseller Osborne and Fourpence- 
halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the light 
of his own soul was taken from him. No land- 
mark on the Earth; and, alas, what is that to 
having no loadstar in the Heaven! We need 
not wonder that none of those Three men rose 
to victory. That they fought truly is the 
highest praise. With a mournful sympathy 
we will contemplate, if not three living victori- 
ous Heroes, as I said, the Tombs of three fall- 
en Heroes! They fell for us, too; making a 
way for us. There are the mountains which 
they hurled abroad in their confused War of 
the Giants; under which, their strength and 
life spent, they now lie buried. 

I have already written of these three Lit- 
erary Heroes, expressly or incidentally ; what 
I suppose is known to most of you; what need 
not be spoken or written a second time. They 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 249 

concern us here as the singular Prophets of 
that singular age; for such they virtually 
were ; and the aspect they and their world 
exhibit, under this point of view, might lead 
us into reflections enough ! I call them, all 
three, Genuine Men, more or less; faithfully, 
for most part unconsciously, struggling, to be 
genuine, and plant themselves on the everlast- 
ing truth of things. This to a degree that 
eminently distinguishes them from the poor 
artificial mass of their contemporaries; and 
renders them worthy to be considered as 
Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting 
truth, as Prophets in that age of theirs. By 
Nature herself a noble necessity was laid on 
them to be so. They were men of such mag- 
nitude that they could not live on unrealities, 
— clouds, froth and all inanity gave way under 
them : there was no footing for them but on 
firm earth ; no rest or regular motion for them, 
if they got not footing there. To a certain 
extent, they were Sons of Nature once more 
in an age of Artifice; once more, Original 
Men. 

As for Johnson, I have always considered 
him to be, by nature, one of our great English 
souls. A strong and noble man; so much left 
undeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlier 
element what might he not have been, — Poet, 
Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man 
must not complain of his 'element,' of his 
'time,' or the like; it is a thriftless work doing 
so. His time is bad: well then, he is there to 
make it better! — Johnson's youth was poor, 



250 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

isolated, hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it 
does not seem possible that, in any the favor- 
ablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life 
could have been other than a painful one. The 
world might have had more of profitable work 
out of him, or less; but his effort against the 
world's work could never have been a light 
one. Nature, in return for his nobleness, had 
said to him, Live in an element of diseased 
sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the 
nobleness were intimately and even insepara- 
bly connected with each other. At all events, 
poor Johnson had to go about girt with contin- 
ual hypochondria, physical and spiritual pain. 
Like a Hercules with the burning Nessus' shirt 
on him, which shoots in on him dull incurable 
misery: the Nessus'-shirt not to be stript off, 
which is his own natural skin ! In this manner 
he had to live. Figure him there, with his 
scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy heart, 
and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking 
mournful as a stranger in this Earth ; eagerly 
devouring what spiritual thing he could come 
at: school-languages and other merely gram- 
matical stuff, if there were nothing better! 
The largest soul that was in all England; and 
provision made for it of 'fourpence-half penny 
a day. ' Yet a giant invincible soul ; a true 
man's. One remembers always that story of 
the shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced, 
rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in 
winter-season, with his shoes worn-out; how 
the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly 
places a new pair at his door; and the raw- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 251 

boned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them 
near, with his dim eyes, with what thought, — 
pitches them out of window ! Wet feet, mud, 
frost, hunger or what you will ; but not beg- 
gary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stub- 
born self-help here ; a whole world of squalor, 
rudeness and confused misery and want, yet of 
nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type 
of the man's life, this pitching-away of the 
shoes. An original man; — not a secondhand, 
borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on 
our own basis, at any rate ! On such shoes as 
we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if 
you will, but honestly on that ; — on the reality 
and substance which Nature gives us, not on 
the semblance, on the thing she has given 
another than us!— 

And yet with all this rugged pride of man- 
hood and self-help, was there ever soul more 
tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to 
what was really higher than he? Great souls 
are always loyally submissive, reverent to 
what is over them ; only small mean souls are 
otherwise. I could not find a better proof of 
what I said the other day, That the sincere 
man was by nature the obedient man; that 
only in a World of Heroes was there loyal 
Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of 
originality is not that it be new: Johnson 
believed altogether in the old : he found the 
old opinions credible for him, fit for him; and 
in a right heroic manner lived under them. 
He is well worth study in regard to that. For 
we are to say that Johnson was far other than 



252 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

a mere man of words and formulas ; he was a 
man of truths and facts. He stood by the old 
formulas; the happier was it for him that he 
could so stand, but in all formulas that he could 
stand by, there needed to be a most genuine 
substance. Very curious how, in that poor 
Paper-age, so barren, artificial, thick-quilted 
with Pedantries, Hearsays, the great Fact of 
this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, 
indubitable, unspeakable, divine-infernal, upon 
this man too! How he harmonized his 
Formulas with it, how he managed at all 
under such circumstances: that is a thing 
worth seeing. A thing 'to be looked at 
with reverence, with pity, with awe.' That 
Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson 
still worshiped in the era .of Voltaire, is to 
me a venerable place. 

It was in the virtue of his sincerity, of his 
speaking still in some sort from the heart of 
Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, 
that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dia- 
lects 'artificial?' Artificial things are not all 
false ; — nay every true Product of Nature will 
infallibly shape itself; we may say all artificial 
things are, at the starting of them, true. 
What we call 'Formulas' are not in their 
origin bad; they are indispensably good. For- 
mula is method, habitude; found wherever 
man is found. Formulas fashion themselves 
as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading 
toward some sacred or high object, whither 
many men are bent. Consider it. One man, 
full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds out a 






LECTURES ON HEROES. 253 

way of doing somewhat, — were it of uttering 
his soul's reverence for the Highest, were it 
but of fitly saluting his fellow-man. An in- 
ventor was needed to do that, a poet; he has 
articulated the dim-struggling thought that 
dwelt in his own and many hearts. This is his 
way of doing that ; these are his footsteps, the 
beginning of a 'Path.' And now see: the 
second man travels naturally in the footsteps 
of his foregoer; it is the easiest method. In 
the footsteps of his foregoer, yet with improve- 
ments, with changes where such seem good; 
at all events with enlargements, the Path ever 
widening itself as more travel it ; — till at last 
there is a broad Highway whereon the whole 
world may travel and drive. While there re- 
mains a City or Shrine, or any Reality to drive 
to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be 
right welcome! When the City is gone, we 
will forsake the Highway. In this manner all 
Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in 
the world have come into existence, and gone 
out of existence. Formulas all begin by being 
full of substance ; you may call them the skin, 
the articulation into shape, into limbs and skin, 
of a substance that is already there : they had 
not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said, 
are not idolatrous till they become doubtful, 
empty for the worshiper's heart. Much as 
we talk against Formulas, I hope no one of us 
is ignorant withal of the high significance of 
true Formulas; that they were, and will ever 
I be, the indispensablest furniture of our habita- 
tion in this world. 



254 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his 
'sincerity.' He has no suspicion of his being 
particularly sincere, — of his being particularly 
anything! A hard-struggling, weary hearted 
man, or 'scholar' as he calls himself, trying 
hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, 
not to starve, but to live — without stealing! 
A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does 
not 'engrave Truth on his watch-seal;' no, but 
he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and 
lives by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once 
more. The man whom Nature has appointed 
to do great things is, first of all, furnished 
with that openness to Nature which renders 
him incapable of being insincere! To his 
large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a 
Fact: all hearsay is hearsay ; the unspeakable 
greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him 
acknowledge it or not, nay even though he 
seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to 
him, — fearful and wonderful, on this hand and 
on that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrec- 
ognized, because never questioned or capable of 
question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Na- 
poleon : all the Great men I ever heard of have 
this as the primary material of them. Innu- 
merable commonplace men are debating, are 
talking everywhere their commonplace doc- 
trines, which they have learned by logic, by 
rote, at secondhand: to that kind of man all 
this is still nothing. He must have truth; 
truth which he feels to be true. How shall he 
stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all mo- 
ments, in all ways, tells him that there is no 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 255 

standing. He is under the noble necessity of 
being true. Johnson's way of thinking about 
this world is not mine, any more than Ma- 
homet's was: but I recognize the everlasting 
element of heart-sincerity in both; and see 
with pleasure how neither of them remains 
ineffectual. Neither of them is as chaff sown; 
in both of them is something which the seed- 
field will grow. 

Johnson was a prophet to his people; 
preached a Gospel to them, — as all like him 
always do. The highest Gospel he preached 
we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence: 
4 in a world where much is to be done, and 
little is to be known,' see how you will do it! 
A thing well worth preaching. 'A world where 
much is to be done, and little is to be known:' 
do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless 
abysses of Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting 
Unbelief; — you were miserable then, power- 
less, mad: how could you do or work at all? 
Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught; — 
coupled, theoretically and practically, with this 
other great Gospel, 'Clear your mind of Cant !' 
Have no trade with Cant : stand on the cold 
mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in 
your own real torn shoes: 'that will be better 
for you,' as Mahomet says! I call this, I call 
these two things joined together, a great Gos- 
pel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at 
that time. 

Johnson's Writings, which once had such 
currency and celebrity, are now, as it were, 
disowned by the young generation. It is not 



256 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

wonderful; Johnson's opinions are fast becom- 
ing obsolete: but his style of thinking and of 
living, we may hope, will never become obso- 
lete. I find in Johnson's Books the indisput- 
able traces of a great intellect and great heart ; 
— ever welcome, under what obstructions and 
perversions soever. They are sincere words, 
those of his; he means things by them. A 
wondrous buckram style, — the best he could 
get to then; a measured grandiloquence, step- 
ping or rather stalking along in a very solemn 
way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a timid 
size of phraseology not in proportion to the 
contents of it: all this you will put-up with. 
For the phraseology, timid or not, has always 
something within it. So many beautiful styles 
and books, with nothing in them; — a man is 
a malefactor to the world who writes such! 
They are the avoidable kind! — Had Johnson 
left nothing but his Dictionary, one. might 
have traced there a great intellect, a genuine 
man. Looking to its clearness of definition, 
its general solidity, honesty, insight and suc- 
cessful method, it may be called the best of all 
Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of archi- 
tectural nobleness; it stands there like a great 
solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetric 
callv complete: you judge that a true Builder 
did 'it. 

One word, in spite of our haste, must be 
granted to poor Bozzy. He passes for a mean, 
inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so in 
many senses. Yet the fact of his reverence 
for Johnson will ever remain noteworthy. The 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 257 

foolish conceited Scotch Laird, the most con- 
ceited man of his time, approaching in such 
awestruck attitude the great dusty irascible 
Pedagogue in his mean garret there: it is a 
genuine reverence for Excellence; a worship 
for Heroes, at a time when neither Heroes nor 
worship were surmised to exist. Heroes, it 
w T ould seem, exist always, and a certain 
worship of them! We will also take the liberty 
to deny altogether that of the witty French- 
man, that no man is a Hero to his valet-de- 
chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero's blame, 
but the Valet's: that his soul, namely, is a 
mean valet-soul! He expects his Hero to 
advance in royal stage-trappings, with mea- 
sured step, trains borne behind him, trumpets 
sounding before him. It should stand rather, 
No man can be a Grand -Monar que to his valet- 
de-chambre. Strip your Louis Quatorze of his 
king-gear, and there is left nothing but a poor 
forked raddish with a head fantastically carved; 
— admirable to no valet. The Valet does not 
know a Hero when he sees him! Alas, no; it 
requires a kind of Hero to do that; — and one 
of the world's wants, in this as in other senses, 
is for most part want of such. 

On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's 
admiration was well bestowed ; that he could 
have found no soul in all England so worthy 
of bending down before? Shall we not say, of 
this great mournful Johnson too, that he 
guided his difficult confused existence wisely; 
led it well, like a right valiant man? That 
waste chaos of Authorship by trade; that 

17 Heroes 



258 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

waste chaos of Skepticism in religion and poli- 
tics, in life- theory and life-practice; in his 
poverty, in his dust and dimness, with the- sick 
body and the rusty coat: he made it do for 
him, like a brave man. Not wholly withoutfa 
loadstar in the Eternal ; he had still a load- 
star, as the brave all need to have: with his 
eyes set on that, he would change his course 
for nothing in these confused vortices of the 
lower sea of Time. 'To the Spirit of Lies, 
bearing death and hunger, he would in no 
wise strike his flag.' Brave old Samuel: 
ullimus Romanomm! 

Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say 
so much. He is not what I call a strong man. 
A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man ; at best, 
intense rather than strong. He had not 'the 
talent of Silence,' an invaluable talent; which 
few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort 
in these times, excel in! The suffering man 
ought really 'to consume his own smoke ;' there 
is no good in emitting smoke till you have 
made it into fire, — which, in the metaphorical 
sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming! 
Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm 
force for difficulty; the first characteristic of 
true greatness. A fundamental mistake to 
call vehemence and rigidity strength ! A man 
is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though 
six men cannot hold him then. He that can 
walk under the heaviest weight without stag- 
gering, he is the strong man. We need for- 
ever, especially in these loud shrieking days, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 259 

to remind ourselves of that. A man who 
cannot hold his peace, till the time comes for 
speaking and acting, is no right man. 

Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of 
him. A high but narrow contracted intensity 
in it: bony brows; deep, strait-set eyes, in 
which there is something bewildered-looking, 
— bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness. 
A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, 
and also of the antagonism against that ; some- 
thing mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by 
intensity: the face of what is called a Fanatic, 
— a sadly contracted Hero! We name him 
here because, with all his drawbacks, and they 
are many, he has the first and chief character- 
istic of a Hero: he is heartily in earnest. In 
earnest, if ever man was; as none of these 
French Philosophers were. Nay. one would 
say, of an earnestness too great for his other- 
wise sensitive, rather feeble nature; and 
which indeed in the end drove him into the 
strangest incoherences, almost delirations. 
There had come, at last, to be a kind of mad- 
ness in him: his Ideas possessed him like 
demons; hurried him so about, drove him 
over steep places! — 

The fault and misery of Rousseau was what 
we easily name by a single word, Egoism; 
which is indeed the source and summary of all 
faults and miseries whatsoever. He had not 
perfected himself into victory over mere 
Desire; a .mean Hunger, in many sorts, was 
still the motive principle of him. I am afraid 
he was a very vain man; hungry for the 



260 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

praises of men. You remember Genlis' ex- 
perience of him. She took Jean Jacques to the 
Theater; he bargaining for a strict incognito, 
—"He would not be seen there for the world ! ' ' 
The curtain did happen nevertheless to be 
drawn aside: the Pit recognized Jean Jacques, 
but took no great notice of him! He ex- 
pressed the bitterest indignation; gloomed 
all evening, spake no other than surly words. 
The glib Countess remained entirely convinced 
that his anger was not at being seen, but at 
not being applauded when seen. How the 
whole nature of the man is poisoned; nothing 
but suspicion, self- isolation, fierce moody 
ways! He could not live with anybody. A 
man of some rank from the country, who vis- 
ited him often, and used to sit with him, ex- 
pressing all reverence and affection for him, 
comes one day, finds Jean Jacques full of the 
sourest unintelligible humor. "Monsieur," 
said Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, "I know 
why you come here. You come to see what 
a poor life I lead; how little is in my poor 
pot that is boiling there. Well, look into the 
pot! There is half a pound of meat, one 
carrot and three onions; that is all: go and 
tell the whole world that, if you like, Mon- 
sieur!" — A man of this sort was far gone. 
The whole world got itself supplied with anec- 
dotes, for light laughter, for a certain theatrical 
interest, from these perversions and contor- 
tions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, feo him they 
were not laughing or theatrical; too real to 
him! The contortions of a dying gladiator: 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 261 

the crowded amphitheater looks-on with enter- 
tainment; but the gladiator is in agonies and 
dying. 

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his 
passionate appeals to Mothers, with his Con- 
trat-socialy with his celebrations of Nature, 
even of savage life in Nature, did once more 
touch upon Reality, struggle toward Reality; 
was doing the function of a Prophet to his 
Time. As he could, and as the Time could ! 
Strangely through all that defacement, degra- 
dation and almost madness, there is in the 
inmost heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real 
heavenly fire. Once more, out of the element 
of that withered mocking Philosophism, Skep- 
ticism and Perciflage, there has arisen in this 
man the ineradicable feeling and knowledge 
that this Life of ours is true ; not a Scepticism, 
Theorem, or Persiflage, but a fact, an awful 
Reality. Nature had made that revelation to 
him ; had ordered him to speak it out. He got 
it spoken out; if not well and clearly, then 
ill and dimly, — as clearly as he could. Nay 
what are all errors and perversities of his, even 
those stealings of ribbons, aimless confused 
miseries and vagabondisms, if we will interpret 
them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlement and 
staggerings to and fro of a man sent on an 
errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot 
yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One 
should have tolerance for a man, hope of him ; 
leave him to try yet what he will do. While 
life lasts, hope lasts for every man. 

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly cele- 



262 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

brated still among his countrymen, I do not 
say much. His Books, like himself, are what 
I call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. 
There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combined 
with such an intellectual gift as his, makes 
pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: 
but they are not genuinely poetical. Not 
white sunlight; something operatic; a kind 
of rosepink, artificial bedizenment. It is 
frequent, or rather it is universal, among the 
French since his time. Madame de Stael has 
something of it; St. Pierre; and down onward 
to the present astonishing convulsionary 'Lit- 
erature of Desperation,' it is everywhere 
abundant. That same rosepink is not the 
right hue. Look at a Shakespeare, at a Goethe, 
even at a Walter Scott! He who has once seen 
into this, has seen the difference of the True 
from the Sham-True, and will discriminate 
them ever afterward. 

We had to observe in Johnson how much 
good a Prophet, under all disadvantages and 
disorganizations, can accomplish for the world. 
In Rousseau we are called to look rather at the 
fearful amount of evil which, under such dis- 
organization, may accompany the good. His- 
torically it is a most pregnant spectacle, that 
of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets, in 
the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and 
Necessities there; driven from post to pillar; 
fretted, exasperated till the heart of him went 
mad, he had grown to feel deeply that the 
world was not his friend nor the world's law. 
It was expedient, if anyway possible, that 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 263 

such a man should not have been set in 
flat hostility with the world. He could be 
cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, 
left to starve like a wild-beast in his cage; — 
but he could not be hindered from setting the 
world on fire. The French Revolution found 
its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious 
speculations on the miseries of civilized life, 
the preferability of the savage to the civil- 
ized, and such-like, helped well to produce a 
whole delirium in France generally. True, 
you way well ask, What could the world, the 
governors of the world, do with such a man? 
Difficult to say what the governors of the world 
could do with him ! What he could do with 
them is unhappily clear enough, — guillotine a 
great many of them ! Enough now of Rous- 
seau. 

It was a curious phenomenon, in the with- 
ered, unbelieving, second hand Eighteenth 
Century, that of a Hero starting up, among 
the artificial pasteboard figures and produc- 
tions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a 
little well in the rocky desert places, — like a 
sudden splendor of Heaven in the artificial 
Vauxhall! People knew not what to make of 
it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall 
fire-work ; alas, it let itself be so taken, though 
struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of 
death, against that! Perhaps no man had 
such a false reception from his fellow-men. 
Once more a very wasteful life-drama was 
enacted under the sun. 



264 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

The tragedy of Burns' life is known to all 
of you. Surely we may say, if discrepancy 
between place held and place merited con- 
stitute perverseness of lot for a man, no lot 
could be more perverse than Burns'. Among 
those secondhand acting-figures, mimes for 
most part, of the Eighteenth Century, once 
more a giant Original Man, one of those men 
who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who 
take rank with the Heroic among men : and 
he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The 
largest soul of all the British lands came 
among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scot- 
tish Peasant. 

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various 
things; did not succeed in any; was involved 
in continual difficultes. The Steward, Factor 
as the Scotch call him, used to send letters and 
threatenings, Burns says, * which threw us all 
into tears.' The brave, hard-toiling, hard- 
suffering Father, his brave heroine of a wife ; 
and those children, of whom Robert was one ! 
In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter 
for them. The letters 'threw us all into 
tears:' figure it. The brave Father, I say 
always; — a silent Hero and Poet; without 
whom the son had never been a speaking one ! 
Burns' Schoolmaster came afterward to Lon- 
don, learnt what good society was; but de- 
clares that in no meeting of men did he ever 
enjoy better discourse than at the hearth of 
this peasant. And his poor 'seven acres of 
nursery-ground, ' — not that, nor the miserable 
patch of clay-farm, nor anything he tried to 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 265 

get a living by, would prosper with him; he 
had a sore unequal battle all his days. But he 
stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, uncon- 
querable man; — swallowing-down how many 
sore sufferings daily in silence; fighting like 
an unseen Hero, — nobody publishing news- 
paper paragraphs about his nobleness; voting 
pieces of plate to him ! However, he was not 
lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there ; the out- 
come of him, — and indeed of many generations 
of such as him. 

This Burns appeared under every disadvant- 
age: uninstructed, poor, born only to hard 
manual toil; and writing, when it came to 
that, in a rustic special dialect, known only to 
a small province of the country he lived in. 
Had he written, even what he did write, in the 
general language of England, I doubt not he 
had already become universally recognized as 
being, or capable to be, one of our greatest 
men. That he should have tempted so many 
to penetrate through the rough husk of that 
dialect of his, is proof that there lay something 
far from common within it. He has gained a 
certain recognition, and is continuing to do so 
over all quarters of our wide Saxon world : 
wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it be- 
gins to be understood, by personal inspection 
of this and the other, that one of the most con- 
siderable Saxon men of the Eighteenth cen- 
tury was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert 
Burns. Yes, I will say, here, too, was a piece 
of the right Saxon stuff; strong as the Harz- 
rock, rooted in the depths of the world ; — rock, 

18 Heroes 



266 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

yet with wells of living softness in it! A wild 
impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty 
slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody 
dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough 
genuineness; homely, rustic, honest; true sim- 
plicity of strength ; with its lightning- fire, with 
its soft dewy pity; — like the old Norse Thor, 
the Peasant-god! 

Burns' Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense 
and worth, has told me that Robert, in his 
young days, in spite of their hardship, was 
usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infi- 
nite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far 
pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in 
the bog, or suchlike, than he ever afterward 
knew him. I can well believe it. This basis 
of mirth i^fond gaillard,' as old Marquis Mira- 
beau calls it), a primal-element of sunshine and 
joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and 
earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive 
characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope 
dwells in him ; spite of his tragical history, he 
is not a mourning man. He shakes his sorrows 
gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over 
them. It is as the lion shaking 'dew-drops 
from his mane;' as the swift-bounding horse, 
that laughs at the shaking of the spear. — But, 
indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns', 
are they not the outcome properly of warm 
generous affection, — such as is the beginning 
of all to every man? 

You would think it strange if I called Burns 
the most gifted British soul we had in all that 
century of his : and yet I believe the day is 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 267 

coming when there will be little danger in 
saying so. His writings, all that he did under 
such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of 
him. Professor Stewart remarked very justly, 
what, indeed, is true of all Poets good for 
much, that his poetry was not any particular 
faculty ; but the general result of a naturally 
vigorous original mind expressing itself in that 
way. Burns' gifts, expressed in conversation, 
are the theme of all that ever heard him. All 
kinds of gifts : from the gracef ulest utterances 
of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate 
speech ; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of 
affection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing in- 
sight; all was in him. Witty duchesses cele- 
brate him as a man whose speech 'led them off 
their feet. ' This is beautiful : but still more 
beautiful that which Mr. Lockhart has re- 
corded, which I have more than once alluded 
to, How the waiters and ostlers at inns would 
get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this 
man speak ! Waiters and ostlers : — they, too, 
were men, and here was a man ! I have heard 
much about his speech ; but one of the best 
things I ever heard of it was, last year, from a 
venerable gentleman long familiar with him. 
That it was speech distinguished by always 
having something in it. "He spoke rather lit- 
tle than much," this old man told me; "sat 
rather silent in those early days, as in the com- 
pany of persons above him ; and always when 
he did speak, it was to throw new light on the 
matter." I know not why any one should ever 
speak otherwise ! — But if we look at his general 



268 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

force of soul, his healthy robustness everyway, 
the rugged downrightness, penetration, gener- 
ous valor and manfulness that was in him, — 
where shall we readily find a better-gifted 
man? 

Among the great men of the Eighteenth 
Century, I sometimes feel as if Burns might 
be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any 
other. They differ widely in vesture ; yet look 
at them intirinsically. There is the same 
burly thick-necked strength of body as of soul, 
• — built, in both cases, on what the old Marquis 
calls a fond gaillard. By nature, by course of 
breeding, indeed, by nation, Mirabeau has 
much more of bluster; a noisy, forward, un- 
resting man. But the characteristic of Mira- 
beau, too, is veracity and sense, power of true 
insight, superiority of vision. The thing that 
he says is worth remembering. It is a flash of 
insight into some object or other ; so do both 
these men speak. The same raging passions; 
capable, too, in both of manifesting themselves 
as the tenderest noble affections. Witt, wild 
laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: these 
were in both. The types of the two men are 
not dissimilar. Burns, too, could have gov- 
erned, debated in National Assemblies; politi- 
cized, as few could. Alas, the courage which 
had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling 
schooners in the Sol way Frith; in keeping 
silence over so much, where no good speech, 
but only inarticulate rage was possible: this 
might have bellowed forth Ushers de Breze 
and the like; and made itself visible to all men, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 269 

in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great 
ever-memorable epochs! But they said to him 
reprovingly, his Official Superiors said, and 
wrote: 'You are to work, not think.' Of 
your thinking-faculty, the greatest in this land, 
we have no need ; you are to gauge beer there ; 
for that only are you wanted. Very notable ; 
— and worth mentioning, though we know 
what is to be said and . answered! As if 
Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all 
times, in all places and situations of the world, 
precisely the thing that was wanted. The fatal 
man, is he not always the unthinking man, the 
man who cannot think and see ; but only grope, 
and hallucinate, and missee the nature of the 
thing he works with? He missees it, mistakes 
it as we say; takes it for one thing, and it is 
another thing, — and leaves him standing like a 
Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutter- 
ably fatal, put in the high places of men. — 
"Why complain of this?" say some: "Strength 
is mournfully denied its arena; that was true 
from of old." Doubtless; and the worse for 
the arena, answer I! Complaining profits lit- 
tle ; stating of the truth may profit. That a 
Europe, with its French Revolution just break- 
ing out, finds no need of a Burns except for 
gauging beer, — is a thing I, for one, cannot 
rejoice at! — 

Once more we have to say here, that the 
:hief quality of Burns is the sincerity of him. 
So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The song he 
>ings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing 
:elt, really there ; the prime merit of this, as 



270 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

of all in him, and of his Life generally, is 
truth. The Life of Burns is what we may call 
a great tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sin- 
cerity, — not cruel, far from that; but wild, 
wrestling naked with the truth of things. In 
that sense, there is something of the savage in 
all great men. 

Hero-worship, — Odin, Burns? Well; these 
Men of Letters, too, were not without a kind 
of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition 
has that got into now! The waiters and ost- 
lers of Scotch inns, prying about the door, 
eager to catch any word that fell from Burns, 
were doing unconscious reverence to the 
Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for wor- 
shiper. Rousseau had worshipers enough; 
princes calling on him in his mean garret ; the 
great, the beautiful doing reverence to the 
poor moonstruck man. For himself a most 
portentous contradiction; the two ends of his 
life not to be brought into harmony. He sits 
at the tables of grandees; and has to copy music 
for his own living. He cannot even get his 
music copied. "By dint of dining out," says 
he, "I run the risk of dying by starvation at 
home. " For his worshipers, too, a most ques- 
tionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or 
badly be the test of vital well-being or ill-being 
to a generation, can we say that these gener- 
ations are very first-rate? — And yet our heroic 
Men of Letters do teach, govern, are kings, 
priests, or what you like to call them ; intrin- 
sically there is no preventing it by any means 
whatever. The world has to obey him who 






LECTURES ON HEROES. 271 

thinks and sees in the world. The world can 
alter the manner of that; can either have it as 
blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as un- 
blessed black thunder and tornado, — with 
unspeakable difference of profit for the world ! 
The manner of it .is very alterable; the mat- 
ter and fact of it is not alterable by any power 
under the sky. Light ; or, failing that, light- 
ning: the world can take its choice. Not 
whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, 
or what we call him ; but whether we believe 
the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be 
a true word, we shall have to believe it ; be- 
lieving it, we shall have to do it. What name 
or welcome we give him or it, is a point that 
concerns ourselves mainly. It, the new Truth, 
new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Uni- 
verse, is verily of the nature of a message from 
on high; and must and will have itself 
obej^ed. — 

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of 
Burns' history, — his visit to Edinburgh. Often 
it seems to me as if his demeanor there were 
the highest proof he gave of what a fund of 
worth and genuine manhood was in him. If 
we think of it, few heavier burdens could be 
laid on the strength of a man. So sudden ; all 
common Lionism, which ruins innumerable 
men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napo- 
leon had been made a king of, not gradually, 
but at once from the Artillery Lieutenancy in 
the Regiment La Fere. Burns, still only in 
his twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a 
ploughman; he is flying to the West Indies to 



272 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is 
a ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a 
year, and these gone from him: next month 
he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handling 
down jeweled Duchesses to dinner; the cyno- 
sure of all eyes ! Adversity is sometimes hard 
upon a man ; but for one man who can stand 
prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand 
adversity. I admire much the way in which 
Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could 
point out, was ever so sorely tried, and so little 
forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished ; not 
abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness 
nor affectation : he feels that he there is the 
man Robert Burns; that the 'rank is but the 
guinea- stamp;' that the celebrity is but the 
candle-light which will show what man, not in 
the least make him a better or other man! 
Alas, it may readil} T , unless he look to it, make 
him a worse man ; a wretched inflated wind- 
bag, — inflated till he burst and become a dead 
lion; for whom, as some one has said, 'there 
is no resurrection of the body;' worse than a 
living dog! — Burns is admirable here. 

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, 
these Lion-hunters were the ruin and death of 
Burns. It was they that rendered it impossi- 
ble for him to live! They gathered round him 
in his Farm; hindered his industry; no place 
was remote enough from them. He could not 
get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was 
disposed to do so. He falls into discontents, 
into miseries, faults; the world getting ever 
more desolate for him ; health, character, peace 




"Robert was usually the gayest of speech." — Page 266. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 273 

of mind all gone; — solitary enough now. It 
is tragical to think of ! These men came but 
to see him ; it was out of no sympathy with 
him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get 
a little amusement: they got their amusement; 
— and the Hero's life went for it! 

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there 
is a kind of 'Light-chafers,' large Fire-flies, 
which people stick upon spits, and illuminate 
the ways with at night. Persons of condition 
can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which 
they much admire. Great honor to the Fire- 
flies! But—!— 



LECTURE VI. 

THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON: 
MODERN REVOLUTIONISM. 

[Friday, 2 2d May, 1840.] 

We come now to the last form of Heroism ; 
that which we call Kingship. The Com- 
mander over Men ; he to whose will our wills 
are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender 
themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, 
may be reckoned the most important of Great 
Men. He is practically the summary for us of 
all the various figures of Heroism; Priest, 
Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual 
dignity we can fancy to reside in a man, 
embodies itself here, to command over us, to 
furnish us with constant practical teaching, to 
tell us for the day and hour what we are to do. 
He is called R.ex, Regulator, Roi: our own 
name is still better; King, Konning, which 
means Can-ning Able-man. 

Numerous considerations, pointing toward 
deep, questionable, and indeed unfathomable 
regions, present themselves here : on the most 
of which we must resolutely for the present 
forbear to speak at all. As Burke said that 
perhaps fair Trial by Jury was the soul of Gov- 
ernment, and that all legislation, administra- 
tion, parliamentary debating, and the rest of 
274 






LECTURES ON HEROES. 275 

it, went on, in 'order to bring twelve impartial 
men into a jury box;' — so, by much stronger 
reason, may I say here, that the rinding of 
your Ableman and getting him invested with 
the symbols of ability, with dignity, worship 
(worth-ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever 
we call it, so that he may actually have room 
to guide according to his faculty of doing it, — 
is the business, well or ill accomplished, of all 
social procedure whatsoever in this world! 
Hustings speeches, Parliamentary motions, 
Reform Bills, French Revolutions, all mean at 
heart this; or else nothing. Find in any coun- 
try the Ablest Man that exists there ; raise him 
to the supreme place, and loyally reverence 
him : you have a perfect government for that 
country; no ballot-box, parliamentary elo- 
quence, voting, constitution-building, or other 
machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit. It 
is in the perfect state; an ideal country. The 
Ablest Man ; he means also the truest-hearted, 
justest, the Noblest Man : what he tells us to 
do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we 
could anywhere or anyhow learn; — the thing 
which it will in all ways behove us, with right 
loyal thankfulness, and nothing doubting, to 
do! Our doing and life were then, so far as 
government could regulate it, well regulated ; 
that were the ideal of constitutions. 

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can 
never be completely embodied in practice. 
Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; 
and we will right thankfully content ourselves 
with any not intolerable approximation 



276 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

i thereto ! Let no man, as Schiller says, too 
J querulously * measure by a scale of perfection 
: the meagre product of reality' in this poor 
world of ours. We will esteem him no wise 
man; we will esteem him a sickly, discon- 
tented, foolish man. And yet, "orT'the other 
hand, it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do 
exist; that if they be not approximated to at 
all, the whole matter goes to wreck! Infal- 
libly. No bricklayer builds a wall perfectly 
perpendicular, mathematically this is not pos- 
sible; a certain degree of perpendicularity 
suffices him, and he, like a good bricklayer, 
who must have done with his job, leaves it so. 
And yet if he sway too much from the perpen- 
dicular; above all, if he throw plummet and 
level quite away from him, and pile brick on 
brick heedless, just as it comes to hand — ! 
Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He 
has forgotten himself; but the Lav/ of Grav- 
itation does not forget to act on him ; he and 
his wall rush down into confused welter of 
ruin! — 

This is the history of all rebellions, French 
Revolutions, social explosions in ancient or 
modern times. You have put the too Unable 
Man at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, 
unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten 
that there is any rule, or natural necessity 
whatever, of putting the Able Man there. 
Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. 
Unable Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a 
word, must adjust himself with quack, in all 
manner of administration of human beings; — 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 277 

which accordingly lie unadministefed, ferment- 
ing into unmeasured masses of failure, of 
indigent misery: in the outward, and in the 
inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch- 
out the hand for their due supply, and it is not 
there. The 'law of gravitation' acts; Nature's 
laws do none of them forget to act. The mis- 
erable millions burst-forth into Sansculottism, 
or some other sort of madness; bricks and 
bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos! — 

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred 
years ago or more, about the ' Divine right of 
Kings,' moulders unread now in the Public 
Libraries of this country. Far be it from us to 
disturb the calm process by which it is disap- 
pearing harmlessly from the earth, in those 
repositories! At the same time, not to let the 
immense rubbish go without leaving us, as it 
ought, some soul of it behind — I will say that 
it did mean something; something true, which 
it is important for us and all men to keep in 
mind. To assert that in whatever man you 
choose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan 
of clutching at him) ; and clapt a round piece of 
metal on the head of, and called King, — there 
straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so 
that he became a kind of god, and a Divintiy 
inspired him with faculty and right to rule 
over you to all lengths: this, — what can we do 
with this but leave it to rot silently in the 
Public Libraries? But I will say withal, and 
that is what these Divine-right men meant, 
That in Kings, and in all human Authorities, 
and relations that men god-created can form 



278 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

among each other, there is verily either a 
Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one 
or the other of these two! For it is false alto- 
gether, what the last Skeptical Century taught 
us, that this world is a steam-engine. There 
is a God in this world; and a God's-sanction, 
or else the violation of such, does look out from 
all ruling and obedience, from all moral acts of 
men. There is no act more moral between 
men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to 
him that claims obedience when it is not due ; 
woe to him that refuses it when it is! God's 
law is in that, I say, however the Parchment- 
laws may run: there is a Divine Right or else 
a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claim 
that one man makes upon another. 

It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: 
in all the relations of life it will concern us; 
in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these. 
I esteem the modern error, That all goes by 
self-interest and the checking and balancing 
of greedy knaveries, and that, in short, there 
is nothing divine whatever in the association 
of men, a still more despicable error, natural 
as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of 
a 'divine right' in people called Kings. I say, 
Find me the true Konning, King, or Able-man, 
and he has a divine right over me. That we 
knew in some tolerable measure how to find 
him, and that all men were ready to acknowl- 
edge his divine right when found: this is pre- 
cisely the healing which a sick world is every- 
where, in these ages, seeking after! The true 
King, as guide of the practical, has ever some- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 279 

thing of the Pontiff in him, — guide of the 
spiritual, from which all practice has its rise. 
This too is a true saying, That the King is head 
of the Church. — But we will leave the Polemic 
stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its book- 
shelves. 

Certainly it is a fearful business, that of hav- 
ing your Ableman to seek, and not knowing in 
what manner to proceed about it! That is the 
world's sad predicament in these times of ours. 
They are times of revolution, and have long 
been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no 
longer heedful of plummet or the law of grav- 
itation, have toppled, tumbled, and it all welt- 
ers as we see! But the beginning of it was 
not the French Revolution; that is rather the 
end, we can hope. It were truer to say, the 
beginning was three centuries farther back : in 
the Reformation of Luther. That the thing 
which still called itself Christian Church had 
become a Falsehood, and brazenly went about 
pretending to pardon men's sins for metallic 
coined money, and to do much else which in 
the everlasting truth of Nature it did not now 
do : here lay the vital malady. The inward 
being wrong, all outward went ever more and 
more wrong. Belief died away; all was 
Doubt, Disbelief. The builder cast away his 
plummet; said to himself, "What is gravita- 
tion? Brick lies on brick there!" Alas, does 
it not still sound strange to many of us, the 
assertion that there is a God's truth in the 
business of god-created men; that all is not a 



280 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

kind of grimace, an 'expediency,' diplomacy, 
one knows not what! — 

From that first necessary assertion of 
Luther's, "You, self-styled Papa, you are no 
Father in God at all; you are — a Chimera, 
whom I know not how to name in polite lan- 
guage!" — from that onward to the shout 
which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the 
Palais-Royal, "Auxarmes!" when the people 
had burst up against all manner of Chimeras, 
— I find a natural historical sequence. That 
shout too, so frightful, half-infernal, was a 
great matter. Once more the voice of awak- 
ened nations; — starting confusedly, as out of 
nightmare, as out of death-sleep, into some dim 
feeling that Life was real ; that God's-world was 
not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal; 
— yes, since they would not have it otherwise. 
Infernal, since not celestial or terrestrial! 
Hollowness, insincerity has to cease; sincerity 
of some sort has to begin. Cost what it may,* 
reigns of terror, horrors of French Revolution 
or what else, we have to return to truth. Here 
is a Truth, as I said : a Truth clad in hellfire, 
since they would not but have it so ! — 

A common theory among considerable parties 
of men in England and elsewhere used to be, 
that the French Nation had, in those days, as 
it were gone mad; that the French Revolution 
was a genral act of insanity, a temporary con- 
version of France and large sections of the 
world into a kind of Bedlam. The Event had 
risen and raged ; but was a madness and non- 
entity, — gone now happily into the region of 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 281 

Dreams and the Picturesque ! — To such com- 
fortable philosophers, the Three Days of July, 
1830, must have been a surprising phenome- 
non. Here is the French Nation risen again, 
in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting 
and being shot, to make that same mad French 
Revolution good! The sons and grandsons cf 
those men, it would seem, persist in the enter- 
prise : they do not disown it ; they will have it 
made good ; will have themselves shot, if it be 
not made good! To philosophers who had 
made up their life-system on that 'madness' 
quietus, no phenomenon could be more alarm- 
ing. Poor Niebuhr, they say, the Prussian 
Professor and Historian, fell broken-hearted in 
consequence; sickened, if we can believe it, 
and died of the Three Days! It was surely not 
a very heroic death; — little better than 
Racine's, dying because Louis Fourteenth 
looked sternly on him once. This world had 
stood some considerable shocks, in its time ; 
might have been expected to survive the 
Three Days too, and be found turning on its 
axis even them! The Three Days told all 
mortals that the old French Revolution, mad 
as it might look, was not a transitory ebulli- 
tion of Bedlam, but a genuine product of this 
Earth where we all live ; that it was verily a 
Fact, and that the world in general would do 
well everywhere to regard it as such. 

Truly, without the French Revolution, one 
would not know what to make of an age like 
this at all. We will hail the French Revolu- 
tion, as shipwrecked mariners might the stern- 



282 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

est rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless 
sea and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a 
terrible one, to this false withered artificial 
time; testifying once more that Nature is pre- 
ternatural; if not divine, then diabolic; that 
Semblance is not Reality; that it has to 
become Reality, or the world will take fire 
under it, — burn it into what it is, namely Noth- 
ing! Plausibility has ended; empty Routine 
has ended; much has ended. This, as with a 
Trump of Doom, has been proclaimed to all 
men. They are the wisest who will learn it 
soonest. Long confused generations before it 
be learned ; peace impossible till it be ! The 
earnest man surrounded, as ever, with a world 
of inconsistencies, can await patiently, 
patiently strive to do his work, in the midst of 
that. Sentence of Death is written down in 
Heaven against all that; sentence of Death is 
now proclaimed on the Earth against it: this 
he with his eyes may see. And surely, I 
should say, considering the other side of the 
matter, what enormous difficulties lie there and 
how fast, fearfully fast, in all countries, the 
inexorable demand for solution of them is 
pressing on, — he may easily find other work to 
do than laboring in the Sansculottic province 
at this time of day! 

To me, in these circumstances, that of 'Hero 
worship' becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; 
the most solacing fact one sees in the world at 
present. There is an everlasting hope in it 
for the management of the world. Had all 
traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 283 

men ever instituted, sunk away,. this would 
remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent 
us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence 
Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar 
through smoke-clouds, dust clouds and all 
manner of down-rushing and conflagration. 

Hero-worship would have sounded very 
strange to those workers and fighters in the 
French Revolution. Not reverence for Great 
Men; not any hope or belief, or even wish, 
that Great Men could again appear in the 
world! Nature, turned into a 'Machine,' was 
as if effete now ; could not any longer produce 
Great Men : — I can tell her, she may give up 
the trade altogether, then; we cannot do with- 
out Great Men! — But neither have I any quar- 
rel with that of 'Liberty and Equality;' with 
the faith that, wise great men being impossible, 
a level immensity of foolish small men would 
suffice. It was a natural faith then and there, 
"Liberty and Equality: no Authority needed 
any longer. Hero-worship, reverence for such 
Authorities, has proved false, is itself a false- 
hood; no more of it! We have had such for- 
geries, we will now trust nothing. So many 
base plated coins passing in the market, the 
belief has now become common that no gold 
: any longer exists, — and even that we can do 
very well without gold!" I find this, among 
other things, in that universal cry of Liberty 
and Equality; and find it very natural, as mat- 
iters then stood. 

And yet surely it is but the transition from 
'false to true. Considered as the whole truth, 



284 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

it is false altogether; — the product of entire 
skeptical blindness, as yet only struggling to 
see. Hero-worship exists forever, and every- 
where: not Loyalty alone; it extends from 
divine adoration down to the lowest practical 
regions of life, 'Bending before men,' if it is 
not to be a mere empty grimace, better dis- 
pensed with than practiced, is Hero-worship, 
— a recognition that there does dwell in that 
presence of our brother something divine ; that 
every created man, as Novalis said, is a 'reve- 
lation in the Flesh. ' They were Poets too, 
that devised all those graceful courtesies which 
make life noble ! Courtesy is not a falsehood 
or grimace ; it need not be such. And Loy- 
alty, religious Worship itself, are still pos- 
sible; nay still inevitable. 

May we not say, moreover, while so many 
of our late Heroes have worked rather as rev- 
olutionary men, that nevertheless every Great 
Man, every genuine man, is by the nature of 
him a son of Order, not of Disorder? It is a 
tragical position for a true man to work in 
revolutions. He seems an anarchist; and 
indeed a painful elevent of anarchy does 
encumber him at every step, — him to whose 
whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. His 
mission is Order; every man's is. He is here 
to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a 
thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of 
Order. Is not all work of man in this world a 
making of Order? The carpenter finds rough 
trees; shapes them, constrains them into 
square fitness, into purpose and use. We are 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 285 

, all born enemies of Disorder: it is tragical for 
. us all to be concerned in image-breaking and 
down-pulling; for the Great Man, more a man 
[; than we, it is doubly tragical. 

Thus too all human things, maddest French 
' Sansculottisms, do and must work toward 
Order. I say, there is not a man in them, 
raging in the thickest of the madness, but is 
} impelled withal, at all moments, toward 
< Order. His very life means that; Disorder is 
'dissolution, death. No chaos but it seeks a 
center to revolve round. While man is man, 
some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary 
finish of a Sansculottism. — Curious: in those 
days when Hero-worship was the most incred- 
ible thing to every one, how it does come out 
nevertheless, and assert itself practically, in a 
way which all have to credit. Divine right, 
'take it on the great scale, is found to mean 
t divine might withal ! While old false Formu- 
las are getting trampled everywhere into de- 
struction, new genuine Substances unexpected- 
ly unfold themselves indestructible. In rebel- 
lious ages, when Kingship itself seems dead 
and abolished. Cromwell, Napoleon step forth 
again as Kings. The history of these men is 
what we have now to look at, as our last phasis 
pf Heroism. The old ages are brought back 
"to us ; the manner in which Kings were made, 
and Kingship itself first took rise, is again 
exhibited in the history of these Two. 



We have had many civil wars in England; 
wars of Red and White Roses, wars of Simon 



286 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

de Montfort; wars enough, which are not very 
memorable. But that war of the Puritans has 
a significance which belongs to no one of the 
others. Trusting to your candor, which will 
suggest on the other side what I have not 
room to say, I will call it a section once more 
of that great universal war which alone makes 
up the true History of the World, — the war 
of Belief against Unbelief! The struggle of 
men intent on the real essence of things, 
against men intent on the semblances and 
forms ot things. The Puritans, to many, seem 
mere savage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of 
Forms; but it were more just to call them 
haters of untrue Forms. I hope we know how 
to respect Laud and his King as well as them. 
Poor Laud seems to me to have been weak 
and ill-starred, not dishonest; an unfortunate 
Pedant rather than anything worse. His 
'Dreams' and superstitions, at which they 
laugh so, have an affectionate, lovable kind of 
character. He is like a College-Tutor, whose 
whole world is forms, College-rules; whose 
notion is that these are the life and safety of 
the world. He is placed suddenly, with that 
unalterable luckless notion of his, at the head 
not of a College but of a Nation to regulate the 
most complex, deep-reaching interests of men. 
He thinks they ought to go by the old decent 
regulations; nay that their salvation will lie 
in extending and improving these. Like a 
weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehem- 
ence toward his purpose; cramps himself to 
it, heeding no voice of prudence, no cry of 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 287 

pity : He will have his College rules obeyed 
by his Collegians ; that first ; and till that, noth- 
ing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. 
He would have it the world was a College of 
that kind, and the world was not that. Alas, 
was not his doom stern enough? Whatever 

: wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully 

t avenged on him? 

It is meritorious to insist on forms ; Religion 

t and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. 

i Everywhere the formed world is the only hab- 

Htable one. The naked formlessness of Puri- 

itanism is not the thing I praise in the Puritans; 
it is the thing I pity, — praising only the spirit 
which had rendered that inevitable! All 

^substances clothe themselves in forms: but 
there are suitable true forms, and then there 
are untrue unsuitable. As the briefest defini- 
tion, one might say, Forms which grow round 
a substance, if we rightly understand that, 

ehwill correspond to the real nature and purport 
:of it, will be true, good; forms which are con- 
sciously put round a substance, bad. I invite 
ryou to reflect on this. It distinguishes true 
ifrom false in Ceremonial form, earnest sol- 
emnity from empty pageant, in all human 
things. 

] There must be a veracity, a natural spon- 
taneity in forms. In the commonest meeting 
of men, a person making, what we call, 'set 
speeches,' is not he an offense? In the mere 
drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies you see 
to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous 
reality within, are a thing you wish to get 



288 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

away from. But suppose now it were some 
matter of vital concernment, some transcend- 
ent matter (as Divine Worship is), about 
which your whole soul, struck dumb with its 
excess of feeling-, knew not how to form 
itself into utterance at all, and preferred form- 
less silence to any utterance there possible, — 
what should we say of a man coming forward 
to represent or utter it for you in the way of 
upholsterer-mummery? — Such a man, — -let him 
depart swiftly, if he love himself! You have 
lost your only son; are mute, struck down, 
without even tears: an importunate man impor- 
tunately offers to celebrate Funeral Games for 
him in the manner of the Greeks ! Such mum- 
mery is not only not to be accepted, — it is 
hateful, unendurable. It is what the old Proph- 
ets called 'Idolatry,' worshiping of hollow 
shows ; what all earnest men do and will reject. 
We can partly understand what those poor 
Puritans meant. Laud dedicating- that St. 
Catharine Creed's Church, in the manner we 
have it described; with his multiplied cere- 
monial bowings, gesticulations, exclamations: 
surely it is rather the rigorous formal Pedant, 
intent on his 'College rules,' than the earnest 
Prophet, intent on the essence of the matter! 
Puritanism found such forms insupportable ; 
trampled on such forms; — we have to excuse 
it for saying, No form at all rather than such! 
It stood preaching in its bare pulpit, with 
nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay, a man 
preaching from his earnest soul into the ear- 
nest souls of men: is not this virtually the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 289 

essence of all Churches whatsoever? The 
nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable 
to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, 
it will clothe itself with due semblance by and 
by, if it be real. No fear of that ; actually no 
fear at all. Given the living man, there will 
be found clothes for him; he will find himself 
clothes. But the suit of clothes pretending 
that it is both clothes and man — ! — We cannot 
'fight the French' by three hundred thousand 
red uniforms; there must be men in the inside 
of them ! Semblance, I assert, must actually 
not divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance 
do, — why then there must be men found to 
rebel against Semblance, for it has become a 
lie! These two Antagonisms at war here, in 
the case of Laud and the Puritans, are as old 
nearly as the world. They went to fierce battle 
over England in that age; and fought out their 
i confused controversy to a certain length, with 
many results for all of us. 

In the age which directly followed that of 
1the Puritans, their cause or themselves were 
I little likely to have justice done them. Charles 
.Second and his Rochesters were not the kind 
! of men you would set to judge what the worth 
or meaning of such men might have been. 
•That there could be any faith or truth in the 
j.life of a man, was what these poor Rochesters, 
and the age they ushered in, had forgotten. 
J i Puritanism was hung on gibbets, — like the 
1 bones of the leading Puritans. Its work never- 
theless went on accomplishing itself. All true 

' 19 Heroes 



290 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

work of a man, hang the author of it on what 
gibbet you like, must and will accomplish 
itself. We have our Habeas- Corpus, our free 
Representation of the People; acknowledg- 
ment, wide as the world, that all men are, or 
else must, shall, and will become, what we call 
free men ; — men with their life grounded on 
reality and justice, not on tradition, which has 
become unjust and a chimera! This in part, 
and much besides this, was the work of the 
Puritans. 

And indeed, as these things became gradu- 
ally manifest, the character of the Puritans 
"began to clear itself. Their memories were, 
one after another, taken down from the gib- 
bet ; nay a certain portion of them are now, in 
these days, as good as canonized. Eliot, 
Hampden, Pym, nay Ludlow, Hutchinson, 
Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of 
Heroes ; political Conscript Fathers, to whom 
in no small degree we owe what makes us a 
free England : it would not be safe for any- 
body to designate these men as wicked now. 
Pew Puritans of note but find their apologists 
somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid 
them by earnest men. One Puritan, I think, 
and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems 
to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty 
apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor 
sinner will acquit of great wickedness. A 
man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so 
forth: but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish 
ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, 
coarse, hypocritical Tarttife ; turning all that 






LECTURES ON HEROES. 291 

noble struggle for constitutional Liberty into a 
sorry farce played for his own benefit: this 
and worse is the character they give of Crom- 
well. And then there come contrasts with 
Washington and others; above all, with these 
noble Pyms and Hampdens,- whose noble work 
he stole for himself, and ruined into a futility 
and deformity. 

This view of Cromwell seems to me the not 
unnatural product of a century like the Eigh- 
teenth. As we said of the Valet, so of the 
Skeptic: He does not know a Hero when he 
sees him! The Valet expected purple man- 
tles, gilt scepters, body-guards and flourishes 
of trumpets : the Skeptic of the Eighteenth cen- 
tury looks for regulated respectable Formulas, 
'Principles,' or what else he may call them; a 
style of speech and conduct which has got to 
seem 'respectable,' which can plead for itself 
in a handsome articulate manner, and gain the 
suffrages of an enlightened skeptical Eigh- 
teenth century! It is, at bottom, the same 
thing that both the Valet and he expect ; the 
garnitures of some acknowledged royalty, 
which then they will acknowledge ! The King 
coming to them in the ragged unformulistic 
state shall be no King. 

For my own share, far be it from me to say 
or insinuate a word of disparagement against 
such characters as Hampden, Eliot, Pym; 
whom I believe to have been right worthy and 
useful men. I have read diligently what books 
and documents about them I could come at; — 
with the honestest wish to admire, to love and 



292 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

worship them like Heroes; but I am sorry to 
say, if the real truth must be told, with very 
indifferent success! At bottom, I found that 
it would not do. They are very noble men, 
these; step along in their stately way, with 
their measured euphemisms, philosophies, par- 
liamentary eloquences, Ship-moneys, Monar- 
chies of Men; a most constitutional, unblam- 
able, dignified set of men. But the heart 
remains cold before them; the fancy alone en- 
deavors to get-up some worship of them. 
What man's heart does, in reality, break-forth 
into any fire of brotherly love for these men? 
They are become dreadfully dull men ! One 
breaks-down often enough in the constitu- 
tional eloquence of the admirable Pym, with 
his 'seventhly and lastly.' You find that it 
may be the admirablest thing in the world, 
but that it is heavy, — heavy as lead, barren as 
brick-clay; that, in a word, for you there is 
little or nothing now surviving there! One 
leaves all these Nobilities standing in their 
niches of honor: the rugged outcast Cromwell, 
he " is the man of them all in whom one still 
finds human stuff. The great savage Bare- 
sark : he could write no euphemistic Monarchy 
of Man ; did not speak, did not work with glib 
regularity ; had no straight story to tell for him- 
self anywhere. But he stood bare, not cased 
in euphemistic coat-of-mail ; he grappled like 
a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the 
naked truth of things! That, after all, is the 
sort of man for one. I plead guilty to valu- 
ing such a man beyond all other sorts of men. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 293 

Smooth-shaven Respectabilities not a few one 
finds, that are not good for much. Small 
thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, 
who would not touch the work but with gloves 
on! 

Neither, on the whole, does this constitu- 
tional tolerance of the Eighteenth century for 
the other happy Puritans seem to be a very 
great matter. One might say, it is but a piece 
of Formalism and Skepticism, like the rest. 
They tell us, It was a sorrowful thing to con- 
sider that the foundation of our English Liber- 
ties should have been laid by 'Superstition. ' 
These Puritans came forward with Calvinistic 
Incredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms, Westmin- 
ster Confessions; demanding chiefly of all, that 
they should have liberty to worship in their 
own way. Liberty to tax themselves: that 
was the thing they should have demanded! 
It was Superstition, Fanaticism, disgraceful 
ignorance of Constitutional Philosophy to in- 
sist on the other thing! — Liberty to tax one- 
self? Not to pay out money from your pocket 
except on reason shown? No century, I think, 
but a rather barren one would have fixed on 
that as the first right of man ! I should say, 
on the contrary, A just man will generally 
have better cause than money in what shape 
soever, before deciding to revolt against his 
Government. Ours is a most confused world; 
in which a good man will be thankful to see 
any kind of Government maintain itself in a 
not unsupportable manner: and here in Eng- 
land, to this hour, if he is not ready to pay a 



294 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

great many taxes which he can see very small 
reason in, it will not go well w T ith him, I think! 
He must try some other climate than this. 
Tax gatherer? Money? He will say: "Take 
my money, since you can, and it is so desirable 
to you; take it— and take yourself away with 
it; and leave me alone to my work here. I 
am still here ; can still work, after all the money 
you have taken from me!" But if they come 
to him, and say, "Acknowledge a Lie: pre- 
tend to say you are worshiping God, when 
you are not doing it: believe not the thing that 
you find true, but the thing that I find, or pre- 
tend to find true!" He will answer: "No; by 
God's help, no! You may take my purse ; but 
I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The 
purse is any Highwayman's who might meet 
me with a loaded pistol, but the Self is mine 
and God my Maker's; it is not yours; and I 
will resist you to the death, and revolt against 
you, and, on the -whole, front all manner of 
extremities, accusations and confusions, in de- 
fense of that!" — 

Really, it seems to me the one reason which 
could justify revolting, this of the Puritans. 
It has been the soul of all just revolts among 
men. Not Hunger alone produced even the 
French Revolution; no, but the feeling of the 
unsupportable all pervading Falsehood which 
had now embodied itself in Hunger, in universal 
material Scarcity and Nonentity, and thereby 
became indisputably false in the eyes of all ! We 
will leave the Eighteenth century with its 'lib- ; 
erty to tax itself. ' We will not astonish our 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 295 

selves that the meaning of such men as the Pur- 
itans remained dim to it. To men who believe 
in no reality at all, how shall a real human soul, 
the intensest of all realities, as it were the 
; Voice of this world's Maker still speaking to 
[ us, — be intelligible? What it cannot reduce 
I into constitutional doctrines relative to 'taxing, ' 
or other the like material interests, gross, pal- 
! pable to the sense, such a century will needs 

• reject as an amorphous heap of rubbish. 

i Hampdens, Pyms and Ship-money will be the 
) theme of much constitutional eloquence, striv- 

• ing to be fervid; — which will glitter, if not as 
\ fire does, then as ice does: and the irreducible 

Cromwell will remain a chaotic mass of 'mad- 
ness,' 'hypocrisy,' and much else. 

From of old, I will confess, this theory of 

Cromwell's falsity has been incredible to me. 

Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great 

! Man whatever. Multitudes of Great Men fig- 

I ure in History as false selfish men ; but if we 

■ will consider it, they are but figures for us, 

unintelligible shadows; we do not see into 

i them as men that could have existed at all. A 

. superficial unbelieving generation only, with 

) no eye but for the surfaces and semblances of 

! things, could form such notions of Great Men. 

s Can a great soul be possible without a con- 

[ science in it, the essence of all real souls, great 

I or small? — No, we cannot figure Cromwell as a 

• Falsity and Fatuity ; the longer I study him 
< and his career, I believe this the less. Why 

• should we? There is no evidence of it. Is it 

• not strange that, after all the mountains of 



296 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

calumny this man has been subject to, after 
being represented as the very prince of liars, 
who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but 
always some cunning counterfeit of truth, 
there should not yet have been one falsehood 
brought clearly home to him? A prince of 
liars, and no lie spoken by him. Not one that 
I could yet get sight of. It is like Pococke 
asking Grotius, Where is your proof of 
Mahomet's Pigeon? No proof? — Let us leave 
all these caluminous chimeras, as chimeras 
ought to be left. They are not portraits of the 
man; they are distracted phantasms of him, 
the joint product of hatred and darkness. 

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, 
it seems to me, a very different hypothesis sug- 
gests itself. What little we know of his earlier 
obscure years, distorted as it has come down 
to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affec- 
tionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous 
melancholic temperament indicates rather a 
seriousness too deep for him. Of those stories 
of 'Specters;' of the white Specter in broad 
daylight, predicting that he should be King of 
England, we are not bound to believe much ; 
— probably no more than of the other black 
Specter, or Devil in person, to whom the 
Officer saw him sell himself before Worcester 
Fight! But the mournful, over-sensitive, 
hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in his young 
years, is otherwise indisputably known. The 
Huntingdon Physician told Sir Philip Warwick 
himself, He had often been sent for at mid- 
night; Mr. Cromwell was full of hypochon- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 297 

dria, thought himself near dying, and "had 
fancies about the Town-cross." These things 
are significant. Such an excitable deep feel- 
ing nature, in that rugged stubborn strength 
of his, is not the symptom of falsehood ; it is 
the symptom and promise of quite other than 
falsehood! 

The young Oliver is sent to study Law; 
falls, or is said to have fallen, for a little 
period, into some of the dissipations of youth ; 
but if so, speedily repents, abandons all this: 
not much above twenty, he is married, set- 
tled as an altogether grave and quiet man. 
'He pays-back what money he had won at 
gambling, ' says the story ; — he does not think 
of any gain of that kind could be really his. 
It is very interesting, very natural, this 'con- 
version,' as they well name it; this awakening 
a great true soul from the worldly slough, to 
see into the awful truth of things ; — to see that 
Time and its shows all rested on Eternity, 
and this poor Earth of ours was the threshold 
either of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver's life at 
St. Ives and Ely, as a sober industrious Far- 
mer, is it not altogether as that of a true and 
devout man? He has renounced the world and 
its ways : its prizes are not the thing that can 
enrich him. He tills the earth ; he reads his 
Bible ; daily assembles his servants round him 
to worship God. He comforts persecuted min- 
isters, is fond of preachers; nay, can himself 
preach, — exhorts his neighbors to be wise, to 
redeem the time. In all this what 'hypoc- 
risy,' 'ambition,' 'cant,' or other falsity? The 

20 Heroes 



298 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

man's hopes, I do believe, were fixed on the 
other Higher World; his aim to get well 
thither, by walking well through his humble 
course in this world. He courts no notice: 
what could notice here do for him? 'Ever in 
his great Taskmaster's eye. ' 

It is striking, too, how he comes-out once 
into public view; he, since no other is willing 
to come: in resistance to a public grievance. 
I mean, in that matter of the Bedford Fens. 
No one else would go to law with Authority; 
therefore he will. That matter once settled, 
he returns back into obscurity, to his Bible 
and his Plough. 'Gain influence'? His in- 
fluence is the most legitimate; derived from 
personal knowledge of him, as a just, religious, 
reasonable and determined man. In this way 
he has lived till past forty; old age is now in 
view of him, and the earnest portal of Death 
and Eternity; it was at this point that he 
suddenly becomes 'ambitious' ! I do not in- 
terpret his Parliamentary mission in that way ! 

His successes in Parliament, his successes 
through the war, are honest successes of a 
brave man; who has more resolution in the 
heart of him, more light in the head of him 
than other men. His prayers to God; his 
spoken thanks to the God of Victory, who had 
preserved him safe, and carried him forward 
so far, through the furious clash of a world all 
set in conflict, through desperate-looking en- 
velopments at Dunbar; through the death-hail 
•of so many battles; mercy after mercy; to the 
'crowning mercy' of Worcester Fight; all this 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 299 

is good and genuine for a deep-hearted Calvi- 
nistic Cromwell. Only to vain -unbelieving 
Cavaliers, worshiping not God but their own 
'lovelocks,' frivolities, and formalities, living 
quite apart from contemplations of God, living 
without 'God in the world, need it seem hypo- 
critical. 

Nor will his participation in the King's 
death involve him in condemnation with us. 
It is a stern business killing of a King! But 
if you once go to war with him, it lies there; 
this and all else lies there. Once at war, you 
have made wager of battle with him : it is he 
to die, or else you. Reconciliation is proble- 
matic; may be possible, or, far more likely, is 
impossible. It is now pretty generally ad- 
mitted that the Parliament, having vanquished 
Charles First, had no way of making any ten- 
able arrangement with him. The large Pres- 
byterian party, apprehensive now of the Inde- 
pendents, were most anxious to do so; anxious 
indeed as for their own existence ; but it could 
not be. The unhappy Charles, in those final 
Hampton-Court negotiations, shows himself as 
a man fatally incapable of being dealt with. 
A man who, once for all, could not and would 
not understand : — whose thought did not in any 
measure represent to him the real fact of the 
matter; nay worse, whose word did not at all 
represent his thought. We may say this of 
him without cruelty, with deep pity rather: 
but it is true and undeniable. Forsaken there 
of all but the name of Kingship, he still, find- 
ing himself treated with outward respect as a 



300 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

King, fancied that he might play-off party 
against party, and smuggle himself into his old 
power by deceiving both. Alas, they both 
discovered that he was deceiving them. A 
man whose word will not inform you at all 
what he means or will do, is not a man you 
can bargain with. You must get out of that 
man's way, or put him out of yours! The 
Presbyterians, in their despair, were still for 
believing Charles, though found false, unbe- 
lievable again and again. Not so Cromwell: 
"For all our fighting," says he, "we are to 
have a little bit of paper?" No! — 

In fact, everywhere we have to note the de- 
cisive practical eye of this man; how he drives 
toward the practical and practicable; has a 
genuine insight into what is fact. Such an 
intellect, I maintain, does not belong to a false 
man: the false man sees false shows, plausi- 
bilities, expediences: the true man is needed 
to discern even practical truth. Cromwell's 
advice about the Parliament's Army, early in 
the contest, How they were to dismiss their 
city-tapsters, flimsy riotous persons, and choose 
substantial yeomen, whose hearts were in the 
work, to be soldiers for them : this is advice by 
a man who saw. Fact answers, if you see into 
Fact! Cromwell's Ironsides were the embodi- 
ment of this insight of his; men fearing God; 
and without any other fear. No more conclu- 
sively genuine set of fighters ever trod the soil 
of England, or any other land. 

Neither will we blame greatly that word of 
Cromwell's to them; which was so blamed: 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 301 

"If the King should meet me in battle, I 
should kill the King." Why not? These 
words were spoken to men who stood as before 
a Higher than Kings. They had set more 
than their own lives on the cast. The Parlia- 
ment may call it, in official language, a fight- 
ing 'for the King;' but we, for our share, can- 
not understand that. To us it is no dilettante 
work, no sleek officiality; it is sheer rough 
death and earnest. They have brought it to 
the calling- forth of War; horrid internecine 
fight, man grappling wkh man in fire-eyed 
rage, — the infernal element in man called 
forth, to try it by that? Do that therefore; 
since that is the thing to be done. — The suc- 
cesses of Cromwell seem to me a very natural 
thing! Since he was not shot in battle, they 
were an inevitable thing. That such a man, • 
with the eye to see, with the heart to dare, 
should advance, from post to post, from vic- 
tory to victory, till the Huntingdon farmer be- 
came, by whatever name you might call him, 
the acknowledged Strongest Man in England, 
virtually the King of England, requires no 
magic to explain it! — 

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a 
man, to fall into skepticism, into dilettantism, 
insincerity; not to know a Sincerity when 
they see it. For this world, and for all worlds, 
what curse is so fatal? The heart lying dead, 
the eye cannot see. What intellect remains is 
merely the vulpine intellect. That a true King 
be sent them is of small use ; they do not know 
him when sent. They say scornfully, Is this 



302 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

your King? The Hero wastes his heroic fac- 
ulty in bootless contradiction from the un- 
worthy; and can accomplish little. For him- 
self he does accomplish a heroic life, which is 
much, which is all ; but for the world he accom- 
plishes comparatively nothing. The wild rude 
Sincerity, direct from Nature, is not glib in 
answering from the witness-box: in your 
small-debt pie-powder court, he is scouted as a 
counterfeit. The vulpine intellect 'detects' 
him. For being a man worth any thousand 
men, the response your Knox, your Cromwell 
gets, is an argument for two centuries whether 
lie was a man at all. God's greatest gift to 
this Earth is sneeringly flung away. The 
miraculous talisman is a paltry plated coin, not 
fit to pass in the shops as a common guinea. 

Lamentable this! I say, this must be 
remedied. Till this be remedied in some 
measure, there is nothing remedied. 'Detect 
quacks?' Yes do, for Heaven's sake ; but know 
withal the men that are to be trusted ! Till 
we know that, what is all our knowledge ; how 
shall we even so much as 'detect'? For the 
vulpine sharpness, which considers itself to be 
knowledge, and 'detects' in that fashion, is far 
mistaken. Dupes indeed are many: but, for 
all dupes, there is none so fatally situated as 
he who lives in undue terror of being duped. 
The world does exist; the world has truth in 
it, or it would not exist! First recognize what 
is true, we shall then discern what is false; 
and properly never till then. 

'Know the men that are to be trusted:' alas, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 303 

this is yet, in these days, very far from us. 
The sincere alone can recognize sincerity. Not 
a Hero only is needed, but a world fit for him ; 
a world not of Valets; — the Hero comes almost 
in vain to it otherwise ! Yes, it is far from 
us: but it must come; thank God, it is visibly 
coming. Till it do come, what have we? 
Ballot-boxes, suffrages, French Revolutions: — ■ 
if we are as Valets, and do not know the Hero 
when we see him, what good are all these? 
A heroic Cromwell comes ; and for a hundred- 
and-fifty years he cannot have a vote from us. 
Why, the insincere, unbelieving word is the 
natural property of the Quack, and of the 
Father of quacks and quackeries! Misery, 
confusion, unveracity are alone possible there. 
By ballot-boxes we after the figure of our 
Quack ; but the substance of him continues. 
The Valet- World has to be governed by the 
Sham-Hero, by the king merely dressed in 
King-gear. It is his; he is its! In brief, one 
of two things: We shall either learn to know 
a Hero, a true Governor and Captain, some- 
what better, when we see him ; or else go on to 
be forever governed by the Unheroic; — had we 
ballot-boxes clattering at every street-corner, 
there were no remedy in these. 

Poor Cromwell, — great Cromwell! The in- 
articulate Prophet; Prophet who could not 
speak. Rude, confused, struggling to utter 
himself, with his savage depth, with his wild 
sincerity; and he looked so strange, among the 
elegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, 
didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic Clarendons ! 



301 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confu- 
sion, visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, 
almost semi-madness; and yet such a clear 
determinate man's-energy working in the 
heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The 
ray as of pure starlight and fire, working in 
such an element of boundless hypochondria, 
unformed black of darkness! And yet withal 
this hypochondria, what was it but the very 
greatness of the man? The depth and tender- 
ness of his wild affections: the quantity of 
sympathy he had with things, — the quantity 
of insight he would yet get into the heart of 
things, the mastery he would yet get over 
things: this was his hypochondria. The 
man's misery as man's misery always does, 
came of his greatness. Samuel Johnson too is 
that kind of man. Sorrow-stricken, half-dis- 
tracted; the wide element of mournful black 
enveloping him, — wide as the world. It is the 
character of a prophetic man ; a man with his 
whole soul seeing, and struggling to see. 

On this ground, too, I explain to myself 
Cromwell's reputed confusion of speech. To 
himself the internal meaning was sun-clear; 
but the material with which he was to clothe it 
in utterance was not there. He had lived; 
silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought round 
him all his days; and in his way of life little 
call to attempt naming or uttering that. With 
his sharp power of vision, resolute power of 
action, I doubt not he could have learned to 
write Books withal, and speak fluently enough; 
— he did harder things than writing of Books. 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 305 

This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for 
doing manfully all things you will set him on 
doing. Intellect is not speaking and logiciz- 
ing; it is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue, Vir- 
tus, manhood, hero-hood, is not fair-spoken im- 
maculate regularity ; it is first of all what the 
Germans well name it, Tugend {Taugend, dow- 
ing, or Dough- tiness), Courage and the Faculty 
to do. This basis of the matter Cromwell had 
in him. 

One understands moreover how, though he 
could not speak in Parliament, he might 
preach, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how 
he might be great in extempore prayer. 
These are the free outpouring utterances of 
what is in the heart: method is not required 
in them ; warmth, depth, sincerity are all that 
is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a 
notable feature of him. All his great enter- 
prises were commenced with prayer. In dark, 
inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers and 
he used to assemble, and pray alternately, for 
hours, for days, till some definite resolution 
rose among them, some 'door of hope,' as they 
would name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. 
In tears, in fervent prayers, and cries to the 
great God, to have pity on them, to make His 
light shine before, them. They, armed Sol- 
diers of Christ, as they felt themselves to be ; 
a little band of Christian Brothers, who had 
drawn the sword against a great black devour- 
ing world not Christian, but Mammonish, 
Devilish, — they cried to God in their straits, in 
their extreme need, not to forsake the Cause 
20 



306 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

that was His. The light which now rose upon 
them, — how could a human. soul, by any means 
at all, get better light? Was not the purpose 
so formed like to be precisely the best, wisest, 
the one to be followed without hesitation any 
more? To them it was as the shining of 
Heaven's own Splendor in the waste-howling 
darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night, that was 
to guide them on their desolate perilous way. 
Was it not such? Can a man's soul, to this 
hour, get guidance by any other method than 
intrinsically by that same, — devout prostration 
of the earnest struggling soul before the 
Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such 
prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voice- 
less, inarticulate one? There is no other 
method. 'Hypocrisy?' One begins to be 
weary of all that. They who call it so, have 
no right to speak on such matters. They 
never formed a purpose, what one can call a 
purpose. They went about balancing expedi- 
encies, plausibilities ; gathering votes, advices ; 
they never were alone with the truth of a thing 
at all. — Cromwell's prayers were likely to be 
'eloquent,' and much more than that. His 
was the heart of a man who could pray. 

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, 
were not nearly so ineloquent, incondite, as 
they look. We find he was, what all speakers 
aim to be, an impressive speaker, even in Par- 
liament; one who, from the first, had weight. 
With that rude passionate voice of his,he was 
always understood to mean something, and 
men wished to know what. He disregarded 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 307 

eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; spoke 
always without premeditation of the words he 
was to use. The Reporters, too, in those days 
seem to have been singularly candid ; and to 
have given the Printer precisely what they 
found on their own note-paper. And withal, 
what a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being 
the premeditative ever-calculating hypocrite, 
acting a play before the world, That to the 
last he took no more charge of his Speeches! 
How came he not to study his words a little, 
before flinging them out to the public? If the 
words were true words, they could be left to 
shift for themselves. 

But with regard to Cromwell's 'lying,' we 
will make one remark. This, I suppose, or 
something like this, to have been the nature of 
it. All parties found themselves deceived in 
him ; each party understood him to be mean- 
ing this, heard him even say so, and behold he 
turns-out to have been meaning that ! He was, 
cry they, the chief of liars. But now, intrinsi- 
cally, is not all this the inevitable fortune, not 
of a false man in such times ; but simply of a 
superior man? Such a man must have reti- 
cences in him. If he walk wearing his heart 
upon his sleeve for daws to peck at, his journey 
will not extend far! There is no use for any 
man's taking up his abode in a house built of 
glass. A man always is to be himself the 
judge how much of his mind he will show to 
other men ; even to those he would have work 
along with him. There are impertinent in- 
quiries made: your rule is, to leave the 



308 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

inquirer uninformed on that matter; not, if 
you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as 
dark as he was! 

This, could one hit the right phrase of 
response, is what the wise and faithful man 
would aim to answer in such a case. 

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the 
dialect of small subaltern parties; uttered to 
them a part of his mind. Each little party 
thought him all its own. Hence their rage, 
one and all, to find him not of their party, but 
of his own party! Was it his blame? At all 
seasons of his history he must have felt, among 
such people, how, if he explained to them the 
deeper insight he had, they must either have 
shuddered aghast at it, or believing it, their 
own little compact hypothesis must have gone 
wholly to wreck. They could not have 
worked in his province any more ; nay perhaps 
they could not now have worked in their own 
province. It is the inevitable position of a 
great man among small men. Small men, 
most active, useful, are to be seen everywhere, 
whose whole activity depends on some convic- 
tion which to you is palpably a limited one ; 
imperfect, what we call an error. But would 
it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or 
often, to disturb them in that? Many a man, 
doing loud work in the world, stands only on 
some thin traditionality, conventionality to him 
indubitable, to you incredible: break that 
beneath him, he sinks to endless depths! "I 
might have m)^ hand full of truth," says Fon- 
tenelle, l 'and open only my little finger." 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 309 

And it this be the fact even in matters of 
doctrine, how much more in all departments 
of practice! He that cannot withal keep his 
mind to himself cannot practice any consider- 
able thing whatever. And we call it 'dissimu- 
lation,' all this? What would you think of 
calling the general of an army a dissembler 
because he did not tell every corporal and pri- 
vate soldier, who pleased to put the question, 
what his thoughts were about everything? — 
Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all 
this in a manner we must admire for its perfec- 
tion. An endless vortex of such questioning 
* corporals' rolled confusedly round him 
through his whole course; whom he did not 
answer. It must have been as a great true- 
seeing man that he managed this too. Not 
one proved falsehood, as I said; not one! Of 
what man that ever wound himself through 
such a coil of things will you say so much? 

But in fact there are two errors, widely 
prevalent, which pervert to the very basis our 
judgments formed about such men as Crom- 
well; about their 'ambition,' 'falsity,' and 
suchlike. The first is what I might call sub- 
stituting the goal of their career for the 
course and starting-point of it. The vulgar 
Historian of a Cromwell fancies that he had 
determined on being Protector of England, at 
the time when he was ploughing the marsh 
lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all. 
mapped out: a program of the whole drama; 
which he then step by step dramatically un- 



S10 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

folded with all manner of cunning, deceptive 
dramaturgy, as he went on, — the hollow 
scheming Play-actor, that he was ! This is a 
radical perversion ; all but universal in such 
cases. And think for an instant how different 
the fact is! How much does one of us foresee 
of his own life? Short way ahead of us it is 
all dim ; an unwound skein of possibilities, of 
apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-loom- 
ing hopes. This Cromwell had not his life 
lying all in that fashion of Program, which he 
needed then, with that unfathomable cunning 
of his, only to enact dramatically, scene after 
scene ! Not so. We see it so ; but to him it 
was in no measure so. What absurdities 
would fall-away of themselves, were this one 
undeniable fact kept honestly in view by His- 
tory ! Historians indeed will tell you that they 
do keep it in view ; — but look whether such is 
practically the fact! Vulgar History, as in 
this Cromwell's case, omits it altogether; even 
the best kinds of History only remember it 
now and then. To remember it duly with 
rigorous perfection, as in the fact it stood, 
requires indeed a rare faculty ; rare, nay impos- 
sible. A very Shakespeare for faculty; or more 
than Shakespeare ; who could enact a brother 
man's biography, see with the brother man's 
eyes at all points of his course what things he 
saw; in short, know his course and him, as few 
'Historians' are like to do. Half or more of all 
the thick-plied perversions which distort our 
image of Cromwell, will disappear, if we 
honestly so much as try to represent them so ; 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 311 

in sequence, as they were; not in the lump, as 
they are thrown-down before us. 

But a second error, which I think the gener- 
ality commit refers to this same 'ambition' 
itself. We exaggerate the ambition of Great 
Men; we mistake what the nature of it is. 
Great Men are not ambitious in that sense ; he 
is a small poor man that is ambitious so. 
Examine the man who lives in misery because 
he does not shine above other men ; who goes 
about producing himself, pruriently anxious 
about his gifts and claims ; struggling to force 
everybody, as it were begging everybody for 
God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, 
and set him over the heads of men ! Such a 
creature is among the wretchedest sights seen 
under this sun. A great man? A poor morbid 
prurient empty man ; fitter for the ward of a 
hospital, than for a throne among men. I 
advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot 
walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at 
him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about 
I him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the 
;man, not his greatness. Because there is 
i nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that 
you would find something in him. In good 
; truth, I believe no great man, not so much as 
a genuine man who had health and real sub- 
stance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever 
much tormented in this way. 

Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to 
be 'noticed' by noisy crowds of people? God his 
Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, 
was already there; no notice would make him 



312 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

other than he already was. Till his hair was 
grown gray; and Life from the downhill slope 
was all seen to be limited, not infinite but 
finite, and all a measurable matter how it 
went, — he had been content to plough the 
ground, and read his Bible. He in his old days 
could not support it any longer, without sell- 
ing himself to Falsehood, that he might ride 
in gilt carriages to Whitehall, and have clerks 
with bundles of papers haunting him, "Decide 
this, decide that," which in utmost sorrow of 
heart no man can perfectly decide! What 
could gilt carriages do for this man? From of 
old, was there not in his life a weight of mean- 
ing, a terror and a splendor as of Heaven 
itself? His existence there as man set him 
beyond the need of gilding. Death, Judg- 
ment and Eternity : these already lay as the 
background of whatsoever he thought or did. 
All his life lay begirt as in a sea of nameless 
Thoughts, which no speech of a mortal could 
name. God's Word, as the Puritan prophets 
of that time had read it; this was great, and 
all else was little to him. To call such a man 
'ambitious,' to figure him as the prurient 
windbag described above, seems to me the 
poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep 
your gilt carriages and huzzahing mobs, keep 
your red-tapeclerks, your influentialities, your 
important businesses. Leave me alone; leave 
me alone; there is too much of life in me 
already!" Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest 
soul in England in his day, was not ambitious. 
* Corsica Boswell' flaunted at public shows with 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 313 

printed ribbons round his hat ; but the great old 
Samuel stayed at home. The world-wide soul 
wrapt-up in its thoughts, in its sorrows; — what 
could paradings, and ribbons in the hat, do 
for it? 

Ah yes, I will say again : The great silent 
men! Looking round on the noisy inanity of 
the world, words with little meaning, actions 
with little worth, one loves to reflect on the 
great Empire of Silence. The noble silent 
men, scattered here and there, each in his de- 
partment; silently thinking, silently working; 
whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention 
of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country 
that has none or few of these is in a bad way. 
Like a forest which has no roots; which had 
all turned into leaves and boughs: — which must 
soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if 
we had nothing but what we can show, or 

j speak. Silence, the great empire of Silence : 
higher than the stars; deeper than the King- 
doms of Death! It alone is great; all else is 
small. — I hope we English will long maintain 

' our grand talent pour le silence. Let others tb at 
cannot do without standing on barrel-heads, 
to spout, and be seen of all the market-place, 
cultivate speech exclusively, — become a most 
green forest without roots! Solomon says, 
There is a time to speak ; but also a time to 
keep silence. Of some great silent Samuel, 
not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnson 
says he was, by want of money, and nothing 
other, one might ask, "Why do not you too get 
up and speak; promulgate your system, found 



314 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

your sect?" "Truly, " he will answer, "I am 
continent of my thought hitherto; happily I 
have yet had the ability to keep it in me, no 
compulsion strong enough to speak it. My 
'system' is not for promulgation first of all; 
it is for serving myself to live by. That is the 
great purpose of it to me. And then the 
'honor'? Alas, yes; — but as Cato said of the 
statue: So many statues in that Forum of 
yours, may it not be better if they ask, Where 

is Cato's statue?" 

But now, by way of counterpoise to this of 
Silence, let me say that there are two kinds of 
ambition; one wholly blamable, the other 
laudable and inevitable. Nature has provided 
that the great silent Samuel shall not be silent 
too long. The selfish wish to shine over others, 
let it be accounted altogether poor and miser- 
able. 'Seekest thou great things, seek them 
not:' this is most true. And yet, I say, there 
is an irrepressible tendency in every man to 
develop himself according to the magnitude 
which Nature has made him of; to speak-out, 
to act-out, what Nature has laid in him. This 
is proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and 
even the summary of duties for a man. The 
meaning of life here on earth might be defined 
as consisting in this: To unfold yourself, to 
work what thing you have the faculty for. It 
is a necessity for the human being, the first 
law of our existence. Coleridge beautifully 
remarks that the infant learns to speak by this 
necessity it feels. — We will say therefore : To 
decide about ambition, whether it is bad or 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 315 

not, you have two things to take into view. 
Not the coveting of the place alone, but the 
fitness for the man of the place withal : that 
is the question. Perhaps the place was his; 
perhaps he had a natural right, and even 
obligation, to seek the place! Mirabeau's 
ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall we 
blame it, if he were 'the only man in France 
that could have done any good there'? Hope- 
fuler perhaps had he not so clearly felt how 
much good he could do ! But a poor Necker, 
who could do no good, and had even felt that 
he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted 
because they had flung him out, and he was 
now quit of it, well might Gibbon mourn over 
him. — Nature, I say, has provided amply, that 
the silent great man shall strive to speak 
withal; too amply, rather! 

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the 
brave old Samuel Johnson, in his shrouded-up 
existence, that it was possible for him to do 
priceless divine work for his country and the 
whole world. That the perfect Heavenly 
Law might be made Law on this Earth; that 
the prayer he prayed daily, 'Thy kingdom 
come,' was at length to be fulfilled! If you 
had convinced his judgment of this; that it was 
possible, practicable; that he the mournful 
silent Samuel was called to take a part in it! 
Would not the whole soul of the man have 
flamed-up into a divine clearness, into noble 
utterance and determination to act; casting 
all sorrows and misgivings under his feet, 
counting all affliction and contradiction small, 



316 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

— the whole dark element of his existence blaz- 
ing into articulate radiance of light and light- 
ning? It were a true ambition this! And 
think now how it actually was with Cromwell. 
From of old, the sufferings of God's Church, 
true zealous Preachers of the truth flung into 
dungeons, whipt, set on pillories, their ears 
cropt-off, God's Gospel-cause trodden under 
foot of the unworthy : all this had lain heavy 
on his soul. Long years he had looked upon 
it, in silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on 
Earth ; trusting well that a remedy in Heaven's 
goodness would come, — that such a course was 
false, unjust, and could not last forever. And 
now behold the dawn of it; after twelve years 
silent waiting, all England stirs itself; there 
is to be once more a Parliament, the Right will 
get a voice for itself: inexpressible well- 
grounded hope has come again into the Earth. 
Was not such a Parliament worth being a 
member of? Cromwell threw down his 
ploughs, and hastened thither. 

He spoke there, — rugged bursts of earnest- 
ness, of a self-seen truth, where we get a 
glimpse of them. He worked there ; he fought 
and strove, like a strong true giant of a man, 
through cannon-tumult and all else, — on and 
on, till the Cause triumphed, its once so for- 
midable enemies all swept from before it, and 
the dawn of hope had become clear light of 
victory and certainty. That he stood there as 
the strongest soul of England, the undisputed 
Hero of all England, — what of this? It is pos- 
sible that the Law of Christ's Gospel could 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 317 

now establish itself in the world! The The- 
ocracy which John Knox in his pulpit might 
dream of as a 'devout imagination,' this prac- 
tical man, experienced in the whole chaos of 
most rough practice, dared to consider as capa- 
ble of being realized. Those that were highest 
in Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, 
were to rule the land: in some considerable 
degree, it might be so and should be so. Was 
it not true, God's truth? And if true, was it 
not then the very thing to do? The strongest 
practical intellect in England dared to answer, 
Yes ! This I call a noble true purpose ; is it 
not, in its own dialect, the noblest that could 
,enter into the heart of Statesman or man? For 
a Knox to take it up was something; but for 
[a Cromwell, with his great sound sense and 
experience of what our world was, — History, 
I think, shows it only this once in such a 
jdegree, I account it the culminating point of 
Protestantism ; the most heroic phasis that 
'Faith in the Bible' was appointed to exhibit 
here below. Fancy it : that it were made man- 
ifest to one of us, how we could make the 
jRight supremely victorious over Wrong, and 
all that we had longed and praj^ed for, as the 
highest good to England and all lands, an 
attainable fact ! Well, I must say, the vul- 
pine intellect, with its knowingness, its alert- 
ness and expertness in 'detecting hypocrites,' 
seems to me a rather sorry business. We have 
pad but one such Statesman in England; one 
nan, that I can get sight of, who ever had in 
che heart of him any such purpose at all. One 



318 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

man, in the course of fifteen hundred years'; 
and this was his welcome. He had adherents 
by the hundred or the ten; opponents by the 
million. Had England rallied all round him, 
— why, then, England might have been a 
Christian land! As it is, vulpine knowingness 
sits yet at its hopeless problem, 'Given a world 
of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their 
united action;'; — how cumbrous a problem, 
you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and 
some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's 
just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, 
the matter begins to stagnate; and this prob- 
lem is becoming to all men a palpably hopeless 
one.— .■« 



But with regard to Cromwell and his pur- 
poses: Hume, and a multitude following him, 
come upon me here with an admission that 
Cromwell was sincere at first; a sincere 

* Fanatic' at first, but gradually became a! 

* Hypocrite' as things opened round him. This! 
of the Fanatic-Hypocrite is Hume's theory of 
it; extensively applied since, — to Mahomet' J) 
and many others. Think of it seriously, you 
will find something in it; not much, not all, 
very far from all. Sincere hero hearts do notj 
sink in this miserable manner. The Sun| ra 
flings-forth impurities, gets balefully incrustedfS 1 
with spots; but it does not quench itself, anc 
become no Sun at all, but a mass of Darkness 
I will venture to say that such never befell aj 
great deep Cromwell ; I think, never. Nature's 
own lion-hearted Son ; Antaeus-like, his strength; 



V 1< 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 319 

:s got by touching the Earth, his Mother; lift 
tiim up from the Earth, lift him up into Hy- 
pocrisy, Inanity, his strength is gone. We will 
not assert that Cromwell was an immaculate 
man; that he fell into no faults, no insin- 
cerities among the rest. He was no dilettante 
professor of 'perfections,' 'immaculate con- 
iucts. ' He was a rugged Orson, rending his 
rough way through actual true work, — doubt- 
less with many a fall therein. Insincerities, 
Suits, very many faults daily and hourly: it 
las too well known to him ; known to God 
'ind him ! The Sun was dimmed many a time ; 
gilt the Sun had not himself grown a Dim- 
less. Cromwell's last words, as he lay waiting 
or death, are those of a Christian heroic man. 
Broken prayers to God, that He would judge 
lim and this Cause, He since man could not, 
n justice yet in pity. The}'' are most touching 
yords. He breathed-out his wild great soul, 
B ts toils and sins all ended now, into the pres- 
nce of his Maker, in this manner. 

I, for one, will not call the man a Hypocrite' 
lypocrite, mummer, the life of him a mere 
heatricality ; empty barren quack, hungry for 
he shouts of mobs? The man had made 
bscurity do very well for him till his head was 
ray; and now he was, there as he stood rec- 
ognized unblamed, the virtual King of Eng- 
md. Cannot a man do without King's 
oaches and Cloaks? Is it such a blessedness 
) have clerks forever pestering you with bun- 
les of papers in red tape? A simple Diocle- 
,an prefers planting of cabbages; a George 



320 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Washington, no very immeasurable man, does 
the like. One would say, it is what any gen- 
uine man could do ; and would do. The instant 
his real work were out in the matter of King- 
ship, — away with it! 

Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispen- 
sable everywhere a King is, in all movements 
of men. It is strikingly shown, in this very 
War, what becomes of men when they cannot 
find a Chief Man, and their enemies can. The 
Scotch Nation was all but unanimous in Puri- 
tanism; zealous and of one mind about it, as 
in this English end of the Island was always 
far from being the case. But there was no 
great Cromwell among them ; poor tremulous, 
hesitating, diplomatic Argyles and suchlike; 
none of them had a heart true enough for the 
truth, or durst commit himself to the truth. 
They had no leader; and the scattered Cavalier 
party in that country had one ; Montrose, the 
noblest of all the Cavaliers; an accomplished, 
gallant-hearted, splendid man; what one may 
call the Hero-Cavalier. Well, look at it; on 
the one hand subjects without a King; on the 
other a King without subjects! The subjects 
without King can do nothing; the subjectless 
King can do something. This Montrose, with 
a handful of Irish or Highland savages, few of 
them so much as guns in their hands, dashes 
at the drilled Puritan armies like a wild whirl- 
wind sweeps them, time after time, some five 
times over, from the field before him. He was 
at one period, for a short while, master of all 
Scotland. One man; but he was a man: a 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 321 

» million zealous men, but without the one ; they 
: against him were powerless ! Perhaps of all 
i the persons in that Puritan struggle, from first 
to last, the single indispensable one was verily 
Cromwell. To see and dare, and decide ; to 
be a fixed pillar in the welter of uncertainty; — 
a King among them, whether they called him 
so or not. 

Precisely here, however, lies the rub for 
Cromwell. His other proceedings have all 
found advocates, and stand generally justified; 
but this dismissal of the Rump Parliament 
and assumption of the Protectorship, is what 
no one can pardon him. He had fairly grown 
; to be King in England; Chief Man of the vic- 
torious party in England: but it seems he 
could not do without the King's Cloak, and 
sold himself to perdition in order to get it. Let 
us see a little how this was. 

England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now 
subdued at the feet of the Puritan Parliament, 
[the practical question arose, What was to be 
jdone with it? How will you govern these 
^Nations, which Providence in a wondrous way 
?has given up to your disposal? Clearly those 
{hundred surviving members of the Long Par- 
liament, who sit there as supreme authority, 
cannot continue forever to sit. What is to be 
done? — It was a question which theoretical con- 
stitution-builders may find easy to answer; 
but to Cromwell, looking there into the real 
practical facts of it, there could be none more 
.complicated. He asked of the Parliament, 

21 Heroes 



322 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

What it was they would decide upon? It was 
for the Parliament to say. Yet the Soldiers 
too, however contrary to Formula, they who 
had purchased this victory with their blood, 
it seemed to them that they also should have 
something to say in it! We will not "For all 
our fighting have nothing but a little piece of 
paper." We understand that the Law of God's 
Gospel, to which He through us has given the 
victory, shall establish itself, or try to establish 
itself, in this land! 

For three years, Cromwell says, this ques- 
tion had been sounded in the ears of the Parlia- 
ment. They could make no answer; nothing 
but talk, talk. Perhaps it lies in the nature 
of parliamentary bodies; perhaps no Parlia- 
ment could in such case make any answer but 
even that of talk, talk ! Nevertheless the ques- 
tion must and shall be answered. Your sixty 
men there, becoming fast odious, even de- 
spicable, to the whole nation, whom the nation 
already calls Rump Parliament, you cannot 
continue to sit there ; who or what then is to 
follow? 'Free Parliament, ' right of Election, 
Constitutional Formulas of one sort or the 
other, — the thing is a hungry Fact coming on 
us, which we must answer or be devoured by 
it ! And who are you that prate of Constitu- 
tional Formulas, rights of Parliament? You 
have had to kill your King, to make Pride's 
Purges, to expel and banish by the law of the 
stronger whosoever would not let your Cause 
prosper: there are but fifty or three-score of 
you left there, debating in these days. Tell 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 323 

\ us what we shall do ; not in the way of for- 
r mula, but of practicable Fact! 

How they did finally answer, remains ob- 
scure to this day. The diligent Godwin him- 
self admits that he cannot make it out. The 
likeliest is, that this poor Parliament still 
would not, and indeed could not dissolve and 
disperse; that when it came to the point of 
actually dispersing, they again, for the tenth 
or twentieth time, adjourned it, — and Crom- 
well's patience failed him. But we will take 
the favorablest hypothesis ever started for the 
Parliament; the favorablest, though I believe 
it is not the true one, but too favorable. 

According to this version : At the uttermost 
crisis, when Cromwell and his Officers were 
met on the one hand, and the fifty or sixty 
Rump Members on the other, it was suddenly 
told Cromwell that the Rump in its despair 
was answering in a very singular way; 
that in their splenetic envious despair, to 
keep out the Army at least, these men were 
hurrying through the House a kind of Reform 
Bill, — Parliament to be chosen by the whole of 
England; equable electoral division into dis- 
\ tricts ; free suffrage, and the rest of it ! A very 
questionable, or indeed for them an unquestion- 
' able thing. Reform Bill, free suffrage of Eng- 
lishmen? Why, the Royalists, themselves, 
\ silenced indeed but not exterminated, perhaps 
outnumber us; the great numerical majority 
of England was always indifferent to our 
Cause, merely looked at it and submitted to it. 
' It is in weight and force, not by counting of 



324 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

heads, that we are the majority! And no\T 
with your Formulas and Reform Bills, the 
whole matter sorely won by our swords, shall 
again launch itself to sea; become a mere hope, 
and likelihood, small even as a likelihood? 
And it is not a likelihood ; it is a certainty, 
which we have won, by God's strength and 
our own right hands, and do now hold here. 
Cromwell walked down to these refractory 
Members; interrupted them in that rapid speed 
of their Reform Bill ; — ordered them to be gone, 
and talk there no more. — Can we not forgive 
him? Can we not understand him? John 
Milton, who looked on it all near at hand, could 
applaud him. The Reality had swept the For- 
mulas away before it. I fancy, most men who 
were realities in England might see into the 
necessity of that. 

The strong daring man, therefore, has set 
all manner of Formulas and logical superficial- 
ities against him ; has dared appeal to the gen- 
uine Fact of this England, Whether it will sup- 
port him or not? It is curious to see how he 
struggles to govern in some constitutional way; 
find some Parliament to support him; but can- 
not. His first Parliament, the one they call 
Barebones' Parliament, is, so to speak, a Con- 
vocation of the Notables. From all quarters 
of England the leading Ministers and chief 
Puritan Officials nominate the men most dis- 
tinguished by religious reputation, influence 
and attachment to the true Cause: these are 
assembled to shape out a plan. They sanc- 
tioned what was past; shaped as they could 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 325 

what was to come. They were scornfully 
called Barebones' Parliament, the man's 
name, it seems, was not Barebones, but Bar- 
bone, — a good enough man. Nor was it a jest, 
their work; it was a most serious reality, — a 
trial on the part of these Puritan Notables how 
far the Law of Christ could become the Law 
of this England. There were men of sense 
among them, men of some quality; men of 
deep piety I suppose the most of them were. 
They failed, it seems, and broke down, endeav- 
oring to reform the Court of Chancery! They 
dissolved themselves, as incompetent; deliv- 
ered up their power again into the hands of the 
Lord General Cromwell, to do with it what he 
liked and could. 

What will he do with it? The Lord General 
Cromwell, ' Commander-in-chief of all the 
Forces raised and to be raised;' he hereby sees 
himself, at this unexampled juncture, as it 
were the one available Authority left in Eng- 
land, nothing between England and utter 
Anarchy but him alone. Such is the undeni- 
able Fact of his position and England's, there 
and then. What will he do with it? After 
deliberation, he decides that he will accept it ; 
will formally, with public solemnity, say and 
vow before God and men, "Yes, the Fact is so, 
and I will do the best I can with it!" Pro- 
tectorship, Instrument of Government, — these 
are the external forms of the thing ; worked 
out and sanctioned as they could in the cir- 
cumstances be, by the Judges, by the leading 
Official people, 'Council of Officers and Persons 



326 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

of interest in the Nation:' and as for the thing 
itself, undeniably enough, at the pass matters 
had now come to, there was no alternative but 
Anarchy or that. Puritan England might ac- 
cept it or not; but Puritan England was, in 
real truth, saved from suicide thereby! — I 
believe the Puritan People did, in an inarticu- 
late, grumbling, yet on the whole grateful 
and real way, accept this anomalous act of 
Oliver's; at least, he and they together made 
it good, and always better to the last. But 
in their Parliamentary articulate way, they had 
their difficulties, and never knew fully what to 
say to it! — 

Oliver's second Parliament, properly his first 
regular Parliament, chosen by the rule laid 
down in the Instrument of Government, did 
assemble, and worked; — but got, before long, 
into bottomless questions as to the Protector's 
right, as to 'usurpation,' and so forth; and 
had at the earliest legal day to be dismissed. 
Cromwell's concluding Speech to these men 
is a remarkable one. So likewise to his third 
Parliament, in similar rebuke for their ped- 
antries and obstinancies. Most rude, chaotic, 
all these Speeches are; but most earnest-look- 
ing. You would say, it was a sincere, helpless 
man; not used to speak the great inorganic 
thought of him, but to act it rather! A help- 
lessness of utterance, in such bursting fulness 
of meaning. He talks much about 'births of 
Providence:' All these changes, so many vic- 
tories and events, were not forethoughts, and 
theatrical contrivances of men, of me or of men ; 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 327 

it is blind blasphemers that will persist in call- 
ing them so! He insists with a heavy sulphur- 
ous wrathful emphasis on this. As he well 
might. As if a Cromwell in that dark huge 
game he had been playing, the world wholly 
thrown into chaos round him, had forseen it 
all, and played it all off like a precontrived 
puppet-show by wood and wire! These things 
were forseen by no man, he says; no man 
could tell what a day would bring forth ; they 
were 'births of Providence, ' God's finger guided 
us on, and we came at last to clear height of 
victory, God's Cause triumphant in these 
Nations; and you as a Parliament could 
assemble together, and say in what manner all 
this could be organized, reduced into rational 
feasibility among the affairs of men. You 
were to help with your wise counsel in doing 
that. "You have had such an opportunity as 
no Parliament in England ever had. " Christ's 
Law, the Right and True, was to be in some 
measure made the Law of this Land. In place 
of that, you have got into your idle pedantries, 
constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings and 
questionings about written laws for my com- 
ing here ; — and would send the whole matter 
in Chaos again, because T have no Notary's 
parchment, but only God's voice from the 
battle-whirlwind, for being President among 
you? That opportunity is gone; and we know 
not when it will return. You have had your 
constitutional Logic; and Mammon's Law, 
not Christ's Law, rules yet in this land, 
"God be judge between you and me!" These 



328 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

are his final words to them : Take you your 
constitution-formulas in your hand; and I my 
informal struggles, purposes, realities and acts ; 
and "God be judge between you and me!" 

We said above what shapeless, involved 
chaotic things the printed Speeches of Crom- 
well are. Wilfully ambiguous, unintelligible, 
say the most: a hypocrite shrouding himself 
in confused Jesuitic jargon! Tome they do 
not seem so. I will say rather, they afforded 
the first glimpses I could ever get into the real- 
ity of this Cromwell, nay into the possibility of 
him. Try to believe that he means something, 
search lovingly what that may be: you will 
find a real speech lying imprisoned in these 
broken rude tortuous utterances; a meaning in 
the great heart of this inarticulate man ! You 
will, for the first time, begin to see that he was 
a man; not an enigmatic chimera, unintelli- 
gible to you, incredible to you. The Histories 
and Biographies written of this Cromwell, writ- 
ten in shallow skeptical generations that could 
not know or conceive of a deep believing man, 
are far more obscure than Cromwell's Speeches. 
You look through them only into the infinite 
vague of Black and the Inane. 'Heats and 
jealousies,' says Lord Clarendon himself: 
* heats and jealousies,' mere crabbed whims, 
theories and crotchets; these induced slow 
sober quiet Englishmen to lay down their 
ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of 
confused war against the best conditioned of 
Kings! Try if you can find that true. Skep- 
ticism writing about Belief may have great 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 329 

gifts ; but it is really ultra vires there. It is 
Blindness laying down the Laws of Optics. — ■ 

Cromwell's third Parliament split on the 
same rock as his second. Ever the constitu- 
tional Formula: How came you there? Show 
us some Notary parchment! Blind pedants: — ■ 
4 'Why, surely the same power which makes 
you a Parliament, that, and something more, 
made me a Protector!" If my Protectorship 
is nothing, what in the name of wonder is your 
Parliamenteership, a reflex and creation of 
that?— 

Parliaments have failed, there remained 
nothing but the way of Despotism. Military 
Dictators, each with his district,, to coerce the 
Royalist and other gainsayers, to govern them, 
if not by act of Parliament, then by the sword. 
Formula shall not carry it, while the Reality 
is here! I will go on, protecting oppressed 
Protestants abroad, appointing just judges, 
wise managers, at home cherishing true Gos- 
pel ministers; doing the best I can to make 
England a Christian England, greater than old 
Rome, the Queen of Protestant Christianity ; I, 
since you will not help me ; I while God leaves 
me life! — Why did he not give it up; retire 
into obscurity again, since the Law would not 
acknowledge him? cry several. That is where 
they mistake. For him there was no giving 
of it up ! Prime Ministers have governed coun- 
tries, Pitt, Bombal, Choiseul ; and their word 
was a law while it held: but this Prime Min- 
ister was one that could not get resigned. Let 
him once resign, Charles Stuart and the Cav- 

22 Heroes 



330 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

aliers waited to kill him ; to kill the Cause and 
him. Once embarked, there is no retreat, no 
return. This Prime Minister could retire no- 
whither except into his tomb. 

One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. 
His complaint is incessant of the heavy burden 
Providence has laid on him. Heavy; which 
he must bear till death. Old Colonel Hutchin- 
son, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson, his old 
battle-mate, coming to see him on some indis- 
pensable business, much against his will, — 
Cromwell 'follows him to the door,' in a most 
fraternal, domestic, conciliatory style; begs 
that he would be reconciled to him, his old 
brother in arms ; says how much it grieves him 
to be misunderstood, deserted by true fellow- 
soldiers, dear to him from of old : the rigorous 
Hutchinson, cased in his Republican formula, 
sullenly goes his way. — And the man's head 
now white ; his strong arm growing weary with 
its long work ! I think always too of his poor 
Mother, now very old, living in that Palace of 
his ; a right brave woman ; as indeed they lived 
all an honest God-fearing Household there: if 
she heard a shot go off, she thought it was her 
son killed. He had to come to her at least once 
a day, that she might see with her own eyes that 

he was yet living. The poor old Mother ! 

What had this man gained; what had he 
gained? He had a life of sore strife and toil, 
to his last day. Fame, ambition, place in His- 
tory? His dead body was hung in chains; his 
'place in History,' — place in History forsooth! 
— has been a place of ignominy, accusation, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 331 

blackness and disgrace; and here, this day, 
who knows if it is not rash in me to be among 
the first that ever ventured to pronounce him 
not a knave and liar, but a genuinely honest 
man ! Peace to him. Did he not, in spite of 
all, accomplish much for us? We walk 
smoothly over his great rough heroic life ; step- 
over his body sunk in the ditch there. We 
need not spurn it, as we step on it! Let the 
Hero rest. It was not to men's judgment that 
he appealed: nor have men judged him very 
well. 

Precisely a century and a year after this of 
Puritanism had got itself hushed up into 
decent composure, and its results made smooth, 
in 1688, there broke out a far deeper explosion, 
much more difficult to hush up, known to all 
mortals, and like to be long known, by the 
name of French Revolution. It is properly 
the third and final act of Protestantism ; the 
explosive confused return of mankind to Real- 
ity and Fact, now that they were perishing of 
Semblance and Sham. We call our English 
Puritanism the second act: "Well then, the 
Bible is true; let us go by the Bible!" "In 
Church," said Luther; "In Church and State," 
said Cromwell, "let us go by what actually is 
God's Truth. " Men have to return to reality; 
they cannot live on semblance. The French 
Revolution, or third act, we may well call the 
final one ; for lower than that savage Sansculot- 
tism men cannot go. They stand there on the 
nakedest haggard Fact, undeniable in all sea- 
sons and circumstances; and may and must 



832 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

begin again confideatly to build up from that. 
The French explosion, like the English one, 
got its King, — who had no Notary parchment 
to show for himself. We have still to glance 
for a moment at Napoleon, our second modern 
King. 

Napoleon does by no means seem to me so 
great a man as Cromwell. His enormous 
victories which reached over all Europe, while 
Cromwell abode mainly in our little England, 
are but as the high stilts on which the man is 
seen standing; the stature of the man is not 
altered thereby. I find in him no such sincerit}^ 
as in Cromwell ; only a far inferior sort. No 
silent walking, through long years, with the 
Awful Unnamable of this Universe; 'walking 
with God,' as he called it; and faith and 
strength in that alone : latent thought and valor, 
content to lie latent, then bur t out as in blaze 
of Heaven's lightning! N;/poleon lived in an 
age when God was no Ion ;er believed ; the 
meaning of all Silence, Latency, was thought 
to be Nonentity : he had £© begin not out of 
the Puritan Bible, but out of poor Sceptical 
Encyclopedias. This was the length the man 
carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His 
compact, prompt, everyway articulate charac- 
ter is in itself perhaps small, compared with 
our great chaotic inarticulate Cromwell's. 
Instead of 'dumb Prophet struggling to speak,' 
we have a portentous mixture of the Quack 
withal! Hume's notion of the Fanatic-Hypo- 
crite, with such truth as it has, will apply 
much better to Napoleon than it did to Crom- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 333 

well, to Mahomet or the like, — where indeed 
taken strictly it has hardly any truth at all. 
An element of blamable ambition shows itself, 
from the first, in this man ; gets the victory 
over him at last, and involves him and his 
work in ruin. 

'False as a bulletin' became a proverb in 
Napoleon's time. He makes what excuse he 
could for it: that it was necessary to mislead 
the enemy, to keep up his own men's courage, 
and so forth. On the whole, there are no 
excuses. A man in no case has liberty to tell 
lies. It had been, in the long run, better for 
Napoleon too if he had not told any. In fact, 
if a man have any purpose reaching beyond 
the hour and day, meant to be found extant 
next day, what good can it ever be to promul- 
gate lies? The lies are found out; ruinous 
penalty is exacted for them. No man will 
believe the liar next time even when he speaks 
truth, when it is of the last importance that 
he be believed. The old cry of wolf! — A Lie 
is nothing; you cannot of nothing make some- 
thing ; you make nothing at last, and lose your 
labor into the bargain. 

Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to 
distinguish between what is superficial and 
what is fundamental in insincerity. Across 
these outer manceuverings and quackeries of 
his, which were many and most blamable, let 
us discern withal that the man had a certain 
instinctive ineradicable feeling for reality ; and 
did base himself upon fact, so long as he had 
any basis. He has an instinct of Nature bet- 



334 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ter than his culture was. His savans, Bourri- 
enne tells us, in that voyage to Egypt were 
one evening busily occupied arguing that there 
could be no God. They had proved it, to their 
satisfaction, by all manner of logic. Napoleon 
looking up into the stars, answers, "Very 
ingenious, Messieurs, but who made all that?" 
The Atheistic logic runs off from him like 
water ; the great Fact stares him in the face : 
''Who made all that?" So too in Practice: he, 
as every man that can be great, or have victory 
in this world, sees, through all entanglements, 
the practical heart of the matter; drives 
straight toward that. When the steward of 
his Tuileries Palace was exhibiting the new 
upholstery, with praises, and demonstration 
how glorious it was r and how cheap withal, 
Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a 
pair of scissors, dipt one of the gold tassels 
from a window curtain, put it in his pocket, 
and walked on. Some days afterward, he 
produced it at the right moment, to the horror 
of his upholstery functionary ; it was not gold 
but tinsel! In Saint Helena, it is notable how 
he still, to his last days, insists on the prac- 
tical, the real. "Why talk and complain; 
above all, why quarrel with one another? 
There is no result in it; it comes to nothing 
that one can do. Say nothing, if one can do 
nothing!" He speaks often so, to his poor 
discontented followers; he is like a piece of 
silent strength in the middle of their morbid 
querulousness there. 

And accordingly was there not what we can 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 335 

call a faith in him, genuine so far as it went? 
That this new enormous Democracy asserting 
itself here in the French Revolution is an 
insuppressible'Fact, which the whole world, 
with its old forces and institutions, cannot put 
down ; this was a true insight of his, and took 
his conscience and enthusiasm along with it, 
— a faith. And did he not interpret the dim 
purport of it well? 'La carriere ouverte mix 
tale?is, The implements to him who can handle 
them:' this actually is the truth, and even the 
whole truth ; it includes whatever the French 
Revolution, or any Revolution, could mean. 
Napoleon, in his first period, was a true Dem- 
ocrat. And yet by the nature of him, fostered 
too by his military trade, he knew that De- 
mocracy, if it were a true thing at all, could not 
be an anarchy: the man had a heart-hatred 
for anarchy. On that Twentieth of June 
(1792), Bourrienne and he sat in a coffee-house, 
as the mob rolled by : Napoleon expresses the 
deepest contempt for persons in authority that 
they do not restrain this rabble. On the Tenth 
of August he wonders why there is no man to 
command these poor Swiss; they would con- 
quer if there were. Such a faith in Democ- 
racy, yet hatred of anarchy, it is that carries 
Napoleon through all his great work. Through 
his brilliant Italian Campaigns, omvard to 
the Peace of Leoben, one would say, his 
inspiration is: 'Triumph to the French Revo- 
lution; assertion of it against these Austrian 
Simulacra that pretend to call it a Simul- 
acrum!' Withal, however, he feels, and has a 



336 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

right to feel, how necessary a strong Author- 
ity is; how the Revolution cannot prosper or 
last without such. To bridle-in that great 
devouring, self-devouring French Revolution; 
to tame it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be 
made good, that it may become organic, and 
be able to live among other organisms and 
formed things, not as a wasting destruction 
alone: is not this still what he partly aimed at, 
as the true purport of his life; nay, what he 
actually managed to do? Through Wagrams, 
Austerlitzes ; triumph after triumph, — he tri- 
umphed so far. There was an eye to see in 
this man, a soul to dare and do. He rose 
naturally to be the King. All men saw that 
he was such. The common soldiers used to 
say on the march: "These babbling Avo- 
cats, up at Paris; all talk and no work! What 
wonder it runs all wrong? We shall have to go 
and put our Petit Caporal there!" They 
went, and put him there ; they and France at 
large. Chief-consulship, Emperorship, vic- 
tory over Europe; — till the poor Lieutenant of 
La Fere, not unnaturally, might seem to him- 
self the greatest of all men that had been in 
the world for some ages. 

But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan- 
element got the upper hand. He apostatized 
from his old faith in Facts, took to believing 
in Semblances ; strove to connect himself with 
Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms, with the ol-d 
false Feudalities which he once saw clearly to 
be false; — considered that he would found "his 
Dynasty" and so forth; that the enormous 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 337 

French Revolution meant only that! The 
man was 'given up to strong delusion, that he 
should believe a lie;' a fearful but most sure 
thing. He did not know true from false now 
when he looked at them, — the fearfulest pen- 
alty a man pays for yielding to untruth of 
heart. Self and false ambition had now 
become his god: self-deception once yielded 
to, all other deceptions follow naturally more 
and more. What a paltry patchwork of the- 
atrical paper mantles, tinsel and mummery, 
had this man wrapt his own great reality in, 
thinking to make it more real thereby! His 
hollow Pope's-Concordat, pretending to be a 
re-establishment of Catholicism, felt by himself 
to be the method of extirpating it, "la vaccine 
de la religion:" his ceremonial Coronations, 
consecrations by the old Italian Chimera in 
Notre Dame, — "wanting nothing to complete 
the pomp of it," as Augereau said, "nothing 
but the half-million of men who had died to 
put an end to all that!" Cromwell's Inaugur- 
ation was by the Sword and Bible ; what we 
must call a genuinely true one. Sword and 
Bible were borne before him, without any 
chimera : were not these the real emblems of 
Puritanism; its true decoration and insignia? 
It had used them both in a very real manner, 
and pretended to stand by them now! But 
this poor Napoleon mistook : he believed too 
much in the Dupeability of men ; saw no fact 
deeper in man than Hunger and this! He was 
mistaken. Like a man that should build upon 



338 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

cloud; his house and he fall down in confused 
wreck, and depart out of the world. 

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element 
exists; and might be developed, were the 
temptation strong enough. 'Lead us not into 
temptation!' But it is fatal, I say, that it be 
developed. The thing into which it enters as 
a cognizable ingredient is doomed to be alto- 
gether transitory ; and, however huge it may 
look, is in itself small. Napoleon's working, 
accordingly, what was it with all the noise it 
made? A flash as of gunpowder wide-spread; 
a blazing up as of dry heath. For an hour the 
whole Universe seems wrapt in smoke and 
flame; but only for an hour. It goes out: the 
Universe with its old mountains and streams, 
its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still 
there. 

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always, 
To be of courage; this Napoleonism was 
unjust, a falsehood, and could not last. It is 
true doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon 
trampled on the world, holding it tyrannously 
down, the fiercer would the world's recoil 
against him be, one day. Injustice pays itself 
with frightful compound-interest. I am not 
sure but he had better have lost his best park 
of artillery, or had his best regiment drowned 
in the sea, than shot that poor German Book- 
seller, Palm! It was a palpable tyrannous 
murderous injustice, which no man, let him 
paint an inch thick, could make out to be 
other. It burnt deep into the hearts of men, 
it and the like of it; suppressed fire flashed in 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 339 

the eyes of men, as they thought of it, — wait- 
ing their day! Which day came: Germany 
rose round him. — What Napoleon did will in 
the long-run amount to what he did justly; 
what Nature with her laws will sanction. To 
what of reality was in him ; to that and nothing 
more. The rest was all smoke and waste. 
La carriere onverte aux talens: that great true 
Message, which has yet to articulate and fulfil 
itself everywhere, he left in a most inarticulate 
state. He was a great ebauche, a rude draught 
never completed; as indeed what great man is 
other? Left in too rude a state, alas! 

His notions of the world, as he expresses 
them there at St. Helena, are almost tragical 
to consider. He seems to feel the most unaf- 
fected surprise that it has all gone so ; that he 
is flung out on the rock here, and the World is 
still moving on its axis. France is great, and 
all-great; and at bottom, he is France. Eng- 
land itself, he says, is by Nature only an 
appendage of France; "another Isle o£ Oleron 
to France." So it was by Nature, by Napol- 
eon-Nature; and 3^et look how in fact — Here 
am I! He cannot understand it: inconceiv- 
able that the reality has not corresponded to his 
program of it; that France was not all-great, 
that he was not France. 'Strong delusion' 
that he should believe the thing to be which 
is not! The compact, clear-seeing decisive 
Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, which 
he once had, has enveloped itself, half-dis- 
solved itself, in a turbid atmosphere of French 
fanfaronade. The world was not disposed to 



340 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

be trodden down underfoot ; to be bound into 
masses, and built together, as he liked, for a 
pedestal to France and him: the world had 
quite other purposes in view! Napoleon's 
astonishment is extreme. But alas, what help 
now? He had gone that way of his; and 
Nature also had gone her way. Having once 
parted with Reality, he tumbles helpless in 
Vacuity ; no rescue for him. He had to sink 
there, mournfully as man seldom did; and 
break his great heart, and die, — this poor 
Napoleon : a great implement too soon wasted, 
till it was useless : our last Great Man ! 

Our last, in a double sense. For here finally 
these wide roamings of ours through so many 
times and places, in search and study of 
Heroes, are to terminate. I am sorry for it : 
there was pleasure for me in this business, if 
also much pain. It is a great subject, and a 
most grave and wide one, this which, not to 
be too grave about it, I have named Hero-wor- 
ship. It enters deeply, as I think, into the 
secret of Mankind's ways and vitalest inter- 
ests in this world, and is well worth explain- 
ing at present. With six months, instead of 
six days, we might have done better. I prom- 
ised to break ground on it; I know not whether 
I have even managed to do that. I have had 
to tear it up in the rudest manner in order to 
get into it at all. Often enough, with these 
abrupt utterances thrown-out, isolated, unex- 
plained, has your tolerance been put to the 
trial. Tolerance, patient candor, all hoping 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 341 

favor and kindness, which I will not speak of 
at present. The accomplished and distin- 
guished, the beautiful, the wise, something of 
what is best in England have listened patiently 
to my rude words. With many feelings, I 
heartily thank you all ; and say, Good be with 
you all! 



SUMMARY. 



LECTURE I. 

THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM. SCANDINAVIAN 
MYTHOLOGY. 

Heroes: Universal History consists essentially of their 
united Biographies. Religion not a man's church- 
creed, but his practical belief about himself and the 
Universe: Both with Men and Nations it is the One fact 
about them which creatively determines all the rest. 
Heathenism: Cristianity: Modern Skepticism. The 
Hero as Divinity. Paganism a fact; not Quackery, nor 
Allegory: Not to be pretentiously 'explained;' to be 

looked at as old Thought, and with sympathy. 

Nature no more seems divine except to the Prophet or 
Poet, because men have ceased to think : To the Pagan 
Thinker, as to a child-man, all was either godlike or 
God. Canopus: Man. Hero-worship the basis of Reli- 
gion, Loyalty, Society. A Hero not 'the creature of 
the time:' Hero-worship indestructible. Johnson: Vol- 
taire. Scandinavian Paganism the Religion . of 

our Fathers. Iceland, the home of the Norse Poets, 
described. The Edda. The primary characteristic of 
Norse Paganism, the impersonation of the visible work- 
ings of Nature. Jotuns and the Gods. Fire: Frost: 
Thunder: The Sun: Sea-Tempest. Mythus of the 
Creation : the Life-Tree Igdrasil. The modern 'Machine 

of the Universe.' The Norse Creed, as recorded, 

the summation of several successive systems: Originally 
the shape given to the national thought by their first 
'Man of Genius.' Odin: He has no history or date; yet 
was no mere adjective, but a man of flesh and blood. 
How deified. The World of Nature, to every man 

a Fantasy of Himself. Odin the inventor of 

342 - 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 343 

Runes, of Letters and Poetry. His reception as a Hero: 
the pattern Norse-Man; a God: His shadow over the 

whole History of his People. The essence of Norse 

Paganism, not so much Morality as a sincere recogni- 
tion of Nature: Sincerity better than Gracefulness. 
The Allegories, the after-creations of the Faith. Main 
practical Belief: Hall of Odin: Valkyrs: Destiny: 
Necessity of Valor. Its worth: Their Sea-Kings, 
Woodcutter Kings, our spiritual Progenitors. The 
growth of Odinism.-- — The strong simplicity of 
Norse lore quite unrecognized by Gray. Thor's verit- 
able Norse rage : Balder, the white Stmgod. How the 
old Norse heart loves the Thundergod, and sports with 
him: Huge Brobdignag genius, needing only to be 
tamed-down, into Shakespeares, Goethes. Truth in the 
Norse Songs: This World a show. Thor's invasion of 
Jotunheim. The Ragnarouk, or Twilight of the Gods : 
The Old must die, that the New and Better may be 
born. Thor's last appearance. The Norse Creed a 
Consecration of Valor. It and the whole Past a pos- 
session of the Present. 

LECTURE II. 

THE HERO AS PROPHET. MAHOMET ; ISLAM. 

The Hero no longer regarded as a God, but as one 
god-inspired. All Heroes primarily of the same stuff ; 
differing according to their reception. The welcome 
of its Heroes, the truest test of an epoch. Odin : Burns. 
Mahomet a true Prophet; not a scheming Im- 
postor. A Great Man, and therefore first of all a sin- 
cere man : No man to be judged merely by his faults. 
David the Hebrew King. Of all acts for man repent- 
ance the most divine : The deadliest sin, a supercilious 

consciousness of none. Arabia described. The 

Arabs always a gifted people; of wild strong feelings, 
and of iron restraint over these. Their Religiosity: 
Their Star- worship : Their Prophets and inspired men ; 
from Job downward. Their Holy Places. Mecca, its 

site, history and government. Mahomet. His 

Youth : His fond Grandfather. Had no book-learning : 
Travels to the Syrian Fairs ; and first comes in contact 



344 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

with the Christian Religion. An altogether solid, 
brotherly, genuine man : a good laugh, and a good flash 
of anger in him withal. Marries Kadijah. Be- 
gins his Prophet-career at forty years of age. Allah 
Akbar ; God is Great: Islam ;*we must submit to God. 
Do we not all live in Islam? Mahomet, 'the Prophet of 

God.' The good Kadijah believes in him: 

Mahomet's gratitude. His slow progress: Among forty 
of his kindred, young Ali alone joined him. His good 
unele expostulates with him: Mahomet, bursting into 
tears, persists in his mission. The Hegira. Propagat- 
ing by the sword : First get your sword : A thing will 
propagate itself as it can. Nature a just umpire. 
Mahomet's Creed unspeakably better than the wooden 
idolatries and jangling Syrian Sects extirpated by it. 
The Koran, the universal standard of Mahometan 
life : An Imperfectly, badly written, but genuine book : 
Enthusiastic extempore preaching, amid the hot haste 
of wrestling with flesh-and-blood and spiritual ene- 
mies. Its direct poetic insight. The World, Man, 
human Compassion ; all wholly miraculous to Mahomet. 

His religion did not succeed by 'being easy." 

None can. The sensual part of it is not of Mahomet's 
making. He himself, frugal ; patched his own clothes ; 
proved a hero in a rough actual trial of twenty-three 
years. Traits of his generosity and resignation. His 

total freedom from cant. His moral precepts not 

always of the superfinest sort; yet is there always a 
tendency to good in them. His Heaven and Hell sen- 
sual, yet not altogether so. Infinite Nature of Duty. 
The evil of sensuality, in the slavery to pleasant things, 
not in the 'enjoyment of them. Mahometanism a reli- 
gion heartily believed. To the Arab Nation it was as a 
birth from darkness into light: Arabia first became 
alive by means of it. 

LECTURE III. 

THE HERO AS POET. DANTE ; SHAKESPEARE. 

The Hero as Divinity or Prophet, inconsistent with 
the modern progress of science : The Hero Poet, a fig- 
ure common to all ages. All Heroes at bottom the 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 345 

same; the different sphere constituting the grand 

distinction: Examples. Varieties of. aptitude. 

Poet and Prophet meet in Vates : Their Gospel the 
same, for the Beautiful and the Good are one. All men 
somewhat of poets ; and the highest Poets far from per- 
fect. Prose, and Poetry or musical Thought. Song a 
kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech: All deep 
things are Song. The Hero as Divinity, as Prophet, 
and then only as Poet, no indication that our estimate 
of the Great Man is diminishing: The Poet seems to be 
losing caste, but it is rather that our notions of God are 

rising higher. Shakespeare and Dante, Saints of 

Poetry. Dante : His history, in his Book and Portrait. 
His scholastic education, and its fruit of subtlety. His 
miseries: Love of Beatrice: His marriage not happy. 
A banished man : Will never return, if to plead guilty 
be the condition. His wanderings : ' ' Come e duro 
calle. " At the Court of Delia Scala. The great soul of 
Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and 
more in Eternity. His mystic, unfathomable Song. 
Death: Buried at Ravenna. His Divina Corn- 
media a Song: Go dep enough, there is music every- 
where. The sincerest of Poems: It has all been as if 
molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. Its Inten- 
sity, and Pictorial power. The three parts made-up of 
the true Unseen World of the Middle Ages: How the 
Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar 
elements of this Creation. Paganism and Christianism. 

Ten silent centuries found a voice in Dante. 

The thing that is uttered from the inmost parts of a 
man's soul differs altogether from what is uttered by 
the outer. The 'uses' of Dante : We will not estimate 
the Sun by the quantity of gas it saves us. Mahomet 
and Dante contrasted. Let a man do his work ; the 

fruit of it is the care of Another than he. As 

Dante embodies musically the Inner Life of the Middle 
Ages, so does Shakespeare embody the Outer Life which 
grew therefrom. The strange outbudding of English 
Existence which we call 'Elizabethan Era.' Shakes- 
peare the chief of all Poets: His calm, all-seeing Intel- 
lect: His marvelous Portrait-painting. The Poet's 

first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect 



346 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

enough, — that he be able to see. Intellect the sum- 
mary of all human gifts : Human intellect and vulpine 
intellect contrasted. Shakespeare's instinctive uncon- 
scious greatness : His works a part of Nature, and par- 
taking of her inexhaustible depth. Shakespeare greater 
than Dante; in that he not only sorrowed, but tri- 
umphed over his sorrows His mirthfulness, and genu- 
ine overflowing love of laughter. His Historical Plays, 
a kind of National Epic. The Battle of Agincourt : A 
noble Patriotism, far other than the 'indifference' 
sometimes ascribed to him. His works, like so many 
windows, through which we see glimpses of the world 
that is in him. Dante the melodious Priest of Middle- 
Age Catholicism: Out of this Shakespeare too their 
rises a kind of Universal Psalm, not unfit to make itself 
heard among still more sacred Psalmist Shakespeare an 
'unconscious Prophet;' and therein greater and truer 
than Mahomet. This poor Warwickshire Peasant worth 
more to us than a whole regiment of highest Dignitar- 
ies: Indian Empire, or Shakespeare, — which? An Eng- 
lish King, whom no time or chance can dethrone : A 
rallying-sign and bond of brotherhood for all Saxon- 
dom: Wheresoever English men and women are, they 
will say to one another, 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours !' 

LECTURE IV. 

THE HERO AS PRIEST. LUTHER ; REFORMATION ; 
KNOX ; PURITANISM. 

The Priesta kind of Prophet; but more familiar, as 
the daily enlightener of daily life. A true Reformer 
he who appeals to Heaven's invisible justice against 
Earth's visible force. The finished Poet often a symp- 
tom that his epoch itself has reached perfection, and 
finished. Alas, the battling Reformer, too, is at times 
a needful and inevitable phenomenon: Offenses do 
accumulate, till they become insupportable. Forms of 
Belief, modes of life must perish ; yet the Good of the 
Past survives, an everlasting possession for us all. 

Idols, or visible recognized Symbols, common to 

all Religions: Hateful only when insincere: The 
property of every Hero, that he come back to sincerity, 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 347 

to reality: Protestantism and 'private judgment.' No 
living communion possible among men who believe 
only in hearsays. The Hero-Teacher, who delivers men 
out of darkness into light. Not abolition of Hero-wor- 
ship does Protestantism mean ; but rather a whole World 

of Heroes, of sincere, believing men. Luther; his 

obscure, seemingly-insignificant birth. His youth 
schooled in adversity and stern reality. Becomes a 
Monk. His religious despair: Discovers a Latin Bible: 
No wonder he should venerate the Bible. He visits 
Rome. Meets the Pope's fire by fire. At the Diet of 
Worms: the greatest moment in the modern History of 

men. The Wars that followed are not to be 

charged to the Reformation. The Old Religion Once 
True: The cry of 'No Popery' foolish enough in these 
days. Protestantism not dead : German Literature and 
the French Revolution rather considerable signs of 
life ! How Lf.ther held the sovereignty of the Refor- 
mation and fcept Peace while he lived. His written 
Works: Their rugged homely strength : His dialect be- 
came the language of all writing. No mortal heart to be 
called braver, ever lived in that Teutonic Kindred, 
whose character is valor: Yet a most gentle heart 
withal, full of pity and love, as the truly valiant heart 
ever is: Traits of character from his Table-Talk: His 
Daughter's Deathbed: The miraculous in Nature. 

His love of Music. His Portrait. Puritanism the 

only phasis of Protestantism that ripened into a living 
faith : Defective enough, but genuine. Its fruit in the 
world. The sailing of the Mayflower from Delft Haven 
the beginning of American Saxondom. In the his- 
tory of Scotland properly but one epoch of world-inter- 
est, — the Reformation by Knox: A 'nation of heroes;' a 
believing nation. The Puritanism of Scotland became 

that of England, of New England. Knox 'guilty' of 

being the bravest of all Scotchmen : Did not seek the 
post of Prophet. At the siege of St. Andrew's Castle. 
Emphatically a sincere man. A Galley-slave on the 
River Loire. An Old-Hebrew Prophet, in the guise of 

an Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Century. 

Knox and Queen Mary: 'Who are you, that presume 
to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?' 



348 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

'Madam, a subject born within the same.' His intol- 
erance — of falsehoods and knaveries. Not a mean acrid 
man ; else he had never been virtual President and Sov- 
ereign of Scotland. His unexpected vein of drollery: 
A cheery social man; practical, cautious, hopeful, 
patient. His 'devout imagination' of a Theocracy, or 
Government of God. Hildebrand wished a Theocracy ; 
Cromwell wished it, fought for it; Mahomet attained it. 
In one form or other, it is the one thing to be struggled 
for. 

LECTURE V. 

THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, 
BURNS. 

The Hero as Man of Letters altogether a product 
of these new ages : A Heroic Soul in very strange guise. 
Literary men; genuine and spurious. Fichte's 'Divine 
Idea of the World:' His notion of the True Man of Let- 
ters. Goethe, the Pattern Literary Hero. The dis- 
organized condition of literature, the summary of all 
other modern disorganizations. The Writer of a true 
Book our true modern Preacher. Miraculous influence 
of Books: The Hebrew Bible. Books are now our 
actual University, our Church, our Parliament. With 
Books, Democracy is inevitable. Thought the true 
thaumaturgic influence, by which man works all 

things whatsoever. Organization of the 'Literary 

Guild:' Needful discipline; 'priceless lessons' of Pov- 
erty. The Literary Priesthood, and its importance to 
society. Chinese Literary Governors. Fallen into 
strange times; and strange things need to be speculated 

upon. An age of Skepticism: The very possibility 

of Heroism formally abnegated. Benthamism an eye- 
less Heroism. Skepticism, Spiritual Paralysis, Insin- 
cerity: Heroes gone-out ; Quacks come-in. Our brave 
Chatham himself lived the strangest mimetic life all 
along. Violent remedial revulsions- Chartisms, French 
Revolutions . The Age of Skepticism passing away. 
Let each Man look to the mending of his own Life. 

Johnson one of our Great English Souls. His 

miserable Youth and Hypochondria: Stubborn Self- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 349 

help. His loyal submission to what is really higher 
than himself. How he stood by the old Formulas : Not 
less original for that. Formulas; their Use and 
Abuse. Johnson's unconscious sincerity: His Twofold 
Gospel, a kind of Moral Prudence and clear Hatred of 
Cant. His writings sincere and full of substance. 
Architectural nobleness of his Dictionary. Boswell, 
with all his faults, a true hero-worshiper of a true 

Hero. Rousseau a morbid, excitable, spasmodic man : 

intense rather than strong. Had not the invalu- 
able 'talent of Silence,' His face, expressive of his 
character. His Egoism: Hungry for the praises of 
men. His Books: Passionate appeals, which did once 
more struggle toward Reality : A Prophet to his Time ; 
as he could, and as the Time could. Rose-pink, and 
artificial bedizenment Fretted, exasperated, till the 
heart of him went mad: He could be cooped, starving, 
into garrets ; laughed at as a maniac ; but he could not 

be hindered from setting the world on fire. Burns 

a genuine Hero, in a withered, unbelieving, sec- 
ond-hand Century. The largest soul of all the British 
lands, came among us in the shape of a hard-handed 
Scottish Peasant. His heroic Father and Mother, and 
their sore struggle through life. His rough untutored 
dialect: Affectionate joy ousness. His writings a poor 
fragment of him. His conversational gifts: High 
duchesses and low ostlers alike fascinated by him. 

Resemblance between Burns and Mirabeau. 

Official Superiors: The greatest 'thinking faculty * in 
this land superciliously dispensed with. Hero-worship 
under strange conditions. The notablest phasis of 
Burn's history his visit to Edinburgh. For one man 
who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will 
stand adversity. Literary Lionism. 

LECTURE VI. 

THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON: MODERN 
REVOLUTIONISM. 

The King the most important of Great Men ; the sum- 
mary of all the various figures of Heroism. To enthrone 
the Ablest Man the true business of all Social proced- 



S50 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ure : The Ideal of Constitutions. Tolerable and intoler- 
able approximations. Divine Rights and Diabolic 

Wrongs. The world's sad predicament; that 

of having its Able-Man to seek, and not knowing in 
what manner to proceed about it. The era of Modern 
Revolutionism dates from Luther. The French Revo- 
lution no mere act of General Insanity ; Truth clad in 
hell-fire; the Trump of Doom to Plausibilities and 
empty Routine. The cry of 'Liberty and Equality' at 
bottom the repudiation of sham Heroes. Hero-worship 
exists forever and everywhere ; from divine adoration 
down to the common courtesies of man and man : The 
Soul of Order, to which all things, Revolutions included, 
work. Some Cromwell or Napoleon the necessary finish 
of a Sansculottism. The manner in which Kings were 
made, and Kingship itself first took rise. Puri- 
tanism a section of the universal war of Belief against 
Make-believe. Laud a weak ill-starred Pedant ; in his 
spasmodic vehemence heeding no voice of prudence, no- 
cry of pity. Universal necessity for true Forms: How 
to distinguish between True and False. The nakedest 
Reality preferable to any empty Semblance, however 
dignified. The work of the Puritans. The Skep- 
tical Eighteenth century, and its constitutional estimate 
of Cromwell and his associates. No wish to disparage 
such characters as Hampden, Eliot, Pym ; a most con- 
stitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. The 
rugged outcast Cromwell, the man of them all in whom 
one still finds human stuff. The One thing worth 

revolting for. Cromwell's 'hypocrisy' an impossible 

theory. His pious Life as a Farmer until forty years 
of age. His public successes honest successes of a brave 
man. His participation in the King's death no ground 
of condemnation. His eye for facts no hypocrite's gift.. 
His Ironsides the embodiment of this insight of his. 

Know the men that may be trusted: Alas, this 

is yet, in these days, very far from us. Cromwell's 
Hypochondria: His reputed confusion of speech: His 
habit of prayer. His speeches unpremeditated and 
full of meaning. His reticences; called 'lying' and 
'dissimulation:' Not one falsehood proved against him. 
Foolish charge of 'ambition.' The great Em- 



LECTURES ON HEROES. 351 

pire of Silence: Noble silent men, scattered here and 
there, each in his department ; silently thinking, silently 
hoping, silently working. Two kinds of ambition; one 
wholly blamable, the other laudable, inevitable: How it 
actually was with Cromwell. Hume's Fanatic- 
Hypocrite theory. How indispensable everywhere a 
King is, in all movements of men. Cromwell, as King 
of Puritanism, of England. Constitutional Palaver: 
Dismissal of the Rump Parliament. Cromwell's Parlia- 
ments and Protectorship: Parliaments having failed, 
there remained nothing for him but the way of Despo- 
tism. His closing days : His poor old Mother. It was 
not to men's judgment that he appealed; nor have 

men judged him very well. The French Revolution, 

the 'third act' of Protestantism. Napoleon, infected 
with the quackeries of his age: Had a kind of sincerity, 
— an instinct toward the practical. His faith, — 'the 
Tools to him that can handle them, ' the whole truth of 
Democracy. His heart-hatred of Anarchy. Finally, his 
quackeries got the upper hand: He would found a 
'Dynasty:' Believed wholly in the Dupeability of Men. 
This Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and could 
not last. " 



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